In 2004, I began teaching a bright young child to read. Like many educators at the time, I turned to the internet for guidance and encountered countless articles claiming that the primary cause of dyslexia was a phonological awareness deficit. This idea—that children with dyslexia struggle mainly because they can't properly perceive or manipulate the sounds in spoken language—dominated the conversation.
I took this at face value initially. But after working intensively with my first student for a year, I started digging deeper. Why could this intelligent child, who had no apparent issues with intelligence or vision, not read English despite my best efforts using conventional approaches?
That question led me on a journey. From 2004 to 2019, I taught over 80 similar children—bright kids labelled as dyslexic or struggling readers who just couldn't seem to crack English reading.
By 2010, after working with about 20 of these students, I reached a firm conclusion: phonological awareness deficit could not be the root cause of their dyslexia. Here's why.
The Multilingual Evidence That Changed My Mind
All my students could read successfully in Malay, a language with a relatively transparent orthography. Those who attended vernacular schools could also read in Pinyin (romanized Mandarin). They managed these other languages without the severe struggles they faced in English.
If the core issue was a phonological awareness deficit—a fundamental problem processing speech sounds—then these children should have struggled to read in any language. Yet they didn't. They thrived in Malay and Pinyin but hit a wall with English. This pointed to something specific about how English (or how we teach English reading) interacts with their learning, not an inherent brain deficit in phonological processing.
This observation came from direct, hands-on experience with dozens of children over years—not from controlled lab studies, but from real teaching in real homes.
Speaking Out and Facing Pushback
I began sharing these findings on social media and blogs. The response was often dismissive or hostile. Many educators and PhD holders blocked me rather than engaging with the evidence from my students' successes. It seemed challenging the dominant narrative was unwelcome, even when it came from someone with extensive practical experience.
In 2015, I commented on a post by Dr. Timothy Shanahan about phonological awareness. He brushed aside my observations, noting that I had no research reports to support my findings.
By 2017, Shanahan had revisited the topic and adjusted his views somewhat. In a re-issued post, he acknowledged newer data suggesting a lower incidence of phonological/phonemic awareness problems in some populations, though he added this with reservations and maintained the overall thrust of the phonological explanation.
I appreciate that even established researchers can evolve, but the initial dismissal highlighted a broader issue in our field.
Why Do We Need Research Reports for Common Sense?
This brings me to a deeper question: Why do we demand research reports for things we can reason through with logic and direct observation?
If nearly all my students could read in transparent languages but not English, the logical conclusion is that the problem isn't a universal phonological deficit. We don't need a peer-reviewed paper to tell us that teaching consonant sounds with extraneous "uh" noises (like "buh" for /b/) makes blending difficult, or that bright children shut down when instruction confuses them. These are observable realities.
Yet, too often, practical experience from tutors and teachers is dismissed unless it fits into a formal study. Meanwhile, millions of children continue to struggle.
My work with these 80 students convinced me that many so-called dyslexic children can become fluent readers when taught with methods that respect how the brain actually maps print to sound—especially avoiding confusing pronunciations and building on successes in other languages. I've seen it happen time and again.
If you're a parent or teacher working with a struggling reader, I encourage you to question the one-size-fits-all phonological deficit explanation. Look at the child's successes in other areas or languages. Experiment with clear, pure sound teaching and logical decoding strategies.
The children I taught weren't broken. They just needed instruction that made sense.
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