The Question No One Has Asked

 

I have written several articles explaining that many children shut down from learning to read because they have been taught letter sounds wrongly — that is, with extraneous “uh” or “huh” noises tacked on, which makes blending almost impossible.

So here is the obvious follow-up question that almost no one ever asks me: If your hypothesis is correct, then how is it that many children who attend schools where “correct” pure sounds are supposedly taught right from Grade One still leave school as functional illiterates? If wrong sounds are the main culprit, shouldn’t every child succeed?

I have answered this in several posts on dyslexiafriend.com, but let me make it crystal clear here.

The answer is early “poisoning” of the mind.

Many toddlers’ minds have already been contaminated long before they reach formal schooling — by well-meaning parents, preschool teachers, YouTube videos, and especially programmes like Baby TV (broadcast in over 100 countries). These sources teach consonants with added extraneous sounds: “buh”, “cuh”, “duh”, “fuh”, etc. Once that wrong model is locked in, it becomes extremely difficult to correct.

Charlie Munger explained it perfectly: “The human mind is like the human egg.” Once the first idea (the wrong sound) gets in, a protective barrier forms. New, correct ideas have a hard time penetrating. This is why even excellent phonics instruction in Grade One often fails for children who were exposed early to the distorted version.

I call this Dysteachia, not dyslexia. The child is not broken — the early input is.

Educators like Mark Seidenberg reinforce the problem when they claim that consonants cannot be taught without extraneous sounds. I have posted videos of preschool children (including one from Lagos) pronouncing pure consonant sounds perfectly. Yet influential voices continue to insist it’s impossible, and many teachers and parents believe them.

Another factor: many adults (including some educators) say, “I turned out fine even though I was taught with extraneous sounds.” This is true for resilient children who eventually figure it out after years of struggle. But this blog is concerned with the children who are prone to shutting down — the bright ones who disengage quickly at the first point of confusion and never recover. For them, the wrong early model is often fatal to their reading journey.

From my work with over 80 struggling readers and the patterns repeated across my blog posts, the sequence is consistent: Early exposure (Baby TV, preschool, home) plants the wrong sounds. 

The mind resists correction (“human egg” effect). 

Even “good” school phonics hits a wall. 

 

As pointed in part 3. When we teach only phonics many kids find it confusing when they encounter the HFW such as when, where, who, one, with and so on, which are not phonetic. They then lose heart and disengage from learning to read.

The child shuts down, gets labelled dyslexic, and the cycle continues.

 

The solution is simple but rarely followed:

·        Teach pure sounds (no extraneous noise) from the very beginning. 

·        Teach letter names alongside sounds (they are powerful anchors). 

·        Explicitly show that letters represent multiple sounds. 

·        Intervene before the wrong model takes hold.

 

We poison young minds with incorrect models and then blame the child’s brain when they fail. Stop the poisoning. Fix the instruction early. The so-called dyslexia epidemic would shrink dramatically.

Bright children can read. We just need to stop getting in their way with flawed early input. This isn’t theory — it’s what I’ve seen work repeatedly in real classrooms and one-to-one sessions.