Since I began writing about literacy in 2010, I have repeatedly highlighted two core reasons why many Malaysian children struggle to learn to read. For years, these observations received little attention from commercial programmes, local academic institutions, and successive Education Ministers. Yet literacy research over the past decade has increasingly moved in a direction consistent with what I have observed through one-to-one work with struggling readers in Sabah.
Malaysia is uniquely positioned to contribute to this discussion. Our children grow up navigating multiple languages and linguistic systems, while the syllable-heavy nature of local speech makes the use of pure, clipped letter sounds especially important when learning to decode English. Malaysian universities could have explored these patterns years ago. Instead, local institutions largely waited for validation from Western research, while practical solutions already visible in classrooms were overlooked.
Over the years, I have tried repeatedly to bring these observations to the attention of policymakers and educational institutions. In April 2018, while completing the manuscript that would become Shut Down Kids, I wrote to the Sabah State Education Department at sps.sabah@moe.gov.my. I explained that I was writing a book on why children shut down from learning in Malaysian schools, offered to provide a copy, and reiterated a point I had been making publicly since 2010: that an isolated "phonological awareness deficit" was not the root cause of reading failure.
I also noted that my earlier approaches to universities, including discussions with Datuk Kamaruzaman at UMS, had not led to any local study of the issue. I requested a response. Like many letters and emails that followed, none was received.
Later that year, I sent copies of Shut Down Kids to Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir.
In January 2023, after the Minister of Education, YB Puan Fadhlina Sidek, spoke about monitoring pupils at risk of dropping out, I wrote to her directly. I argued that many at-risk students are not merely identified by the education system but are, in part, created by it through confusion in early reading instruction. I suggested that the number requiring intervention could be reduced if schools focused on preventing the problem rather than treating it later.
In that letter, I described my experience teaching more than eighty children labelled dyslexic or weak readers since 2004. Many had been unable to read even simple sentences when they first came to me, yet later succeeded academically, including one student who graduated with a double degree from the University of South Australia in 2021. Follow-up emails and social media tags generated no response. To date, no Education Minister has publicly addressed what I regard as the instructional roots of the problem.
The two misconceptions that continue to contribute to reading failure are relatively straightforward.
1. The Phonological Awareness Deficit Assumption
For many years, the dominant view held that an isolated phonological awareness (PA) deficit was the primary cause of reading difficulties. The model was presented as largely linear: children were expected to develop sound awareness first and only later connect those skills to print. Those who struggled were frequently described as having a brain-based deficit.
In 2015, I wrote to Dr Timothy Shanahan arguing that an isolated phonological awareness deficit was not the underlying cause of children's inability to read. At the time, he disagreed. However, in a September 2017 revision of an earlier article, he acknowledged that newer large-scale studies suggested the incidence of phonological or phonemic awareness problems among struggling readers was lower than he had previously believed. He noted that this was the one aspect of his earlier explanation he would change.
While modest, that public adjustment was broadly consistent with what I had been observing and writing about since 2010.
The relationship between phonological awareness and reading is not one-way. It is reciprocal. Children do not first master abstract sound manipulation and then apply it to print. Learning letters and connecting them to speech sounds helps strengthen and stabilise phonological awareness itself. When phonological awareness difficulties are treated as fixed internal causes, attention may be diverted from weaknesses in early instruction that can often be addressed.
2. Teaching Consonant Sounds with an Added Schwa
A second, and still widespread, practice creates unnecessary difficulty for beginning readers: attaching an extra vowel sound, or schwa, to consonants.
Children are taught that t is pronounced "tuh", b is "buh", and p is "puh". When they attempt to read a word such as bat, they may produce something closer to "buh-ah-tuh". The result bears little resemblance to the spoken word they are trying to identify.
To succeed, the child must perform an additional mental task: removing the inserted "uh" sounds while simultaneously remembering the letters and blending the sounds together. This creates unnecessary cognitive load at precisely the stage when reading should be becoming easier.
Research by Gonzalez-Frey and Ehri (2021) found that segmentation methods involving schwa intrusion can interfere with blending. Children may lose track of letters, forget earlier sounds, and experience repeated failure. Pure, continuous consonant sounds avoid much of this interference and make blending more straightforward.
The cumulative effect of unnecessary difficulty is often predictable: fatigue, frustration, declining confidence, and eventually a decision to stop trying. It is a pattern I have observed repeatedly since 2004.
When a child shuts down, it is rarely a reflection of intellectual ability. More often, it is a response to instruction that has made a learnable task unnecessarily difficult. Expensive interventions introduced years later are generally less efficient than preventing the problem in kindergarten and Primary 1.
Teachers should model pure consonant sounds and avoid adding the schwa where possible. Classrooms that make this adjustment can reduce the number of children who later require intensive remediation.
I remain willing to discuss these observations with the Ministry of Education, universities, researchers, or educators interested in examining what works with children previously labelled unable to read.
The research evidence has continued to evolve. The practical solutions have been visible for many years. The question is no longer whether these issues deserve attention, but whether we are prepared to act on what we already know.
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