Instructional Clarity: The Missing Key in Reading

 

There is an on-going LinkedIn discussion where Emma Hartnell-Baker insists that orthographic mapping only occurs via phonics.

I replied: I beg to disagree as I know that to be incorrect. I have addressed this in full in my blog post. Here are questions I asked which no one has answered.

Here is my first question that Diana Black Kennedy has responded to.

How did the deaf and mute learn to read words back in the 1840’s when pictures/ images were accompanied with words? For example, a picture of a dog with the word ‘dog’ below it. Let us remember these are deaf and mute people which means they cannot hear any sound of words let alone phonemes. The deaf and mute first learned to read this way.

 

Diana Black Kennedy   Educational Therapist, Speaker, Author

Answer--not all of them did learn. Science has shown that about 5-10 percent of children are able to crack the alphabetic code with little instruction, and an additional 10-20 percent with weak instruction. Those kids sure make teachers feel good and often wedded to ineffective means.

 

Luqman michel:

You have missed the point completely. That answer I gave is to explain that one can learn even if one is mute and deaf.

Not all of those who can speak and hear can read either. How do you account for about 20% of kids who leave school as functional illiterates?

My point is not that phonics should be abandoned — I teach phonics myself and see its value. What I am highlighting is that phonics is not the only pathway by which orthographic mapping can occur.

History shows us that deaf and mute learners in the 1800s, who had no access to phonemes, still managed to acquire reading through pairing images with written words. Likewise, during the Whole Language period, many children did learn to read despite the absence of systematic phonics. That does not mean Whole Language was ideal, but it does demonstrate that orthographic mapping can take place without sound.

So, while phonics is a powerful and efficient route, insisting it is the sole route ignores both historical evidence and lived experience. My concern is that such insistence risks dismissing the progress of those who learned differently, and risks overlooking instructional clarity as the decisive factor. Wrong teaching — distorted sounds and guessing strategies — causes disengagement. Clear teaching, whether through phonics or other structured exposure, enables success.

In short: phonics is essential, but not exclusive. Children can and do learn to read without sound, and acknowledging that reality strengthens, rather than weakens, our case for better instruction.

 

Diana Black:

Generally they have had bad instruction--usually three cueing or whole word. That pushes many kids who would otherwise be able to learn to read with structured literacy--explicit, systematic, phonics/orthography/morphology instruction--into illiteracy. And research shows that about 5% won't reach literacy levels above 3-5th grade even with high quality instruction. Thinking that either end of the bell curve--those who can learn to read with almost no instruction and those who cannot learn to read with even the best instruction somehow negates what we know about how kids learn to read and write misses the role that statistical learning, working memory, phonemic awareness, executive functioning and rapid naming play in learning to read.

Luqman Michel:

I agree with you that poor instruction has pushed many children into unnecessary struggle. Where I differ is in the idea that a fixed 5% “cannot” learn even with high‑quality instruction. My experience with over 80 struggling readers suggests that most of these children were simply confused at the start.

When children are taught the wrong sounds of letters they disengage. Once disengaged, they are often labelled “dyslexic” or placed in the group deemed incapable. But when clarity is restored—teaching correct letter sounds, showing that letters often represent more than one sound, and reinforcing high‑frequency words through rote memorization—many of these same children succeed.

The tragedy is not that 5% are biologically barred from literacy, but that countless children are failed by instruction that obscures rather than illuminates the code of written English. Functional illiteracy persists not because of innate limits, but because confusion at the foundation has never been properly addressed.

Comment now added:

Siegfried Engelmann, the architect of Direct Instruction, once said that only about one percent of children could not be taught to read. If that is true, then the millions of children leaving school illiterate today are not victims of biology but of failed instruction.