Do We Really Need Peer Review for Common Sense in Reading Instruction?

 

 In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Professor Graham Kendall and Dr. Alice Hughes (University of Melbourne) emphasised the importance of formal peer review for any claim to become part of the scientific record. I pushed back firmly: when it comes to teaching children to read, some problems are glaringly obvious from real classroom experience. Real results with real children should drive immediate change — not be delayed for years by academic gatekeeping.

This isn’t abstract theory. It is harming millions of children who are wrongly labelled “dyslexic” largely because of flawed teaching practices.

My Observations from Over 20 Years of Teaching

In 2004, I left my job as an accountant to teach children labelled as dyslexic. I worked with more than 80 such students and saw a consistent, striking pattern: almost all could read in Malay, and those from vernacular schools could read in Pinyin (Chinese), but they failed in English.

The dominant explanation at the time — phonological awareness deficit — simply did not match the clear evidence before me. From around 2010, I began arguing publicly that this could not be the root cause. Many educators, most of them PhD holders, blocked me on social media rather than engage with these observations. I raised this issue along with several other critical matters in education, yet instead of sparking research or simple classroom trials, the repeated response was to silence the discussion by blocking. Why did these senior academics not investigate these obvious patterns themselves? Why did they choose to block rather than explore?

Only around 2017 did research papers begin to appear that supported exactly what I had observed years earlier in practice.

My core practical finding remains this:

Teaching stop consonants with extraneous vowels — “buh,” “kuh,” “tuh,” or “ah” instead of the pure sounds (/b/, /k/, /t/) — makes blending letters into words almost impossible for many children. Trying to blend “kuh-ah-tuh” into “cat” is artificial and confusing. Because they fail at this unnecessary task, they are wrongly labelled dyslexic.

This is not a fringe idea. Many effective structured literacy approaches already emphasise pure sounds and continuous blending precisely because the added vowels distort words and create needless failure.

Why Peer Review Feels Slow and Frustrating in This Case:

I fully agree that peer review is essential for complex scientific claims. It protects against bias and poor methods. However, when children’s time, confidence, and entire futures are at stake, hiding behind “we need more peer review” becomes unacceptable. For more than fifteen years, instead of testing these observable patterns or making simple changes, many academics chose to block and dismiss. Singapore screens in Primary 1 and identifies only about 3.5% with dyslexia by Primary 3 — far lower than the persistent literacy struggles seen in many English-dominant countries. Dyslexia is real and neurological, but we must stop blaming children’s brains for problems created by poor teaching methods.

A Practical Way Forward

We do not need to abandon peer review for major causal claims. But for basic teaching techniques like letter sounds and blending, we must prioritise:

Immediate classroom testing. Simple A/B comparisons of pure sounds + continuous blending versus traditional “buh-tuh” methods, with clear tracking of results.

Open, transparent sharing of what actually works.

Real engagement instead of blocking. Academics should test promising observations rather than silence them.

 

Children struggling today cannot — and should not — wait for perfect academic consensus. Simple changes to how we articulate sounds cost almost nothing and could prevent years of unnecessary frustration, failure, and harmful labelling.

Let’s stop the endless debate and focus on what actually helps children learn to read.