The Puzzle That Started It All
Every genuine breakthrough begins when someone dares to ask the questions others ignore.
When I began teaching my first student, I was struck by a puzzle: how could such an intelligent child fail to read in English after two full years of schooling? That simple question opened a path that has guided my work ever since.
Here are three video clips of a boy with dyslexia in Perth, Australia, reading Dolch high-frequency words from Lessons 1 to 6 of my book. He learned these words through rote memorisation.
High-frequency words (commonly known as Dolch words) are words that appear frequently in everyday language and especially in books for beginning readers. Examples include: the, went, she, you, see, to, like, and one.
A sight word refers to any word that a child has stored in their sight vocabulary — that is, a word they recognise and read instantly and automatically upon seeing it, without needing to decode it.
I explicitly teach all my students to rote-memorise these high-frequency words. In practice, the children repeatedly say the letter names (not the letter sounds) while learning them.
This approach contrasts with the position taken by many Science of Reading advocates, including literacy researchers Dr. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates (authors of Shifting the Balance). They recommend against memorising high-frequency words as wholes and instead emphasise explicitly teaching children to map individual speech sounds (phonemes) to letters or letter groups (graphemes) so they can decode words independently.
However, my students — including this boy with dyslexia — successfully memorised all 220 Dolch words by repeating the letter names. This outcome suggests that rote memorisation of high-frequency words remains an effective and practical strategy for many learners, even when it does not rely on phoneme-grapheme mapping.
Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from lessons 1 to 4
My post from 2010 on Lesson 13 is unavailable.
Here is the link to lesson 13 from 2020.
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/11/lesson-13-oat.html#more
Malaysia’s poor PISA performance is not about “context” or “Covid excuses” — it is about systemic negligence: wrong teaching of letter sounds, failure to remediate intelligent children who disengage, and a culture of denial among so‑called experts like Dr. Anuar Ahmad who block questions instead of answering them. Singapore screens and rescues its “shutdown kids” early, Malaysia labels them dyslexic and leaves them behind.
My journey into literacy advocacy began not as a trained teacher, but as a curious observer. I wanted to understand why so many bright children struggled to read in English, even though they could read fluently in Malay and Pinyin. That question drove me to teach from 2004 to 2010, and through those years I discovered something crucial: the widely accepted explanation—that dyslexia is caused by a phonological awareness deficit—was simply not true. All of my students could read in other languages; their difficulty was specific to English.
This is a repost of an article written by my mentor, Dr. Richard Selznick, several years ago. Its message remains as relevant today as ever, reminding us to keep our focus on the heart of the matter when helping children learn to read. LINK
The parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant has echoed across centuries as a cautionary tale about partial truths and fragmented perspectives. Each blind man, grasping only one part of the elephant, confidently describes the whole animal—yet each account is incomplete, even misleading.