Recently, I had a thoughtful discussion on LinkedIn with Brenda Nagberi, Founder & Lead Consultant at Bremon Educational Consult, Autism Advocate, and SENCo.
It mirrors conversations I've had with many educators and experts — productive until they block me or delete the thread.
The Key Exchange:
This morning I came across two tweets that highlight the ongoing confusion in literacy instruction.
Waveofthefuture (@Sustain_VA) wrote:
“Phonics can be a tool for the simplest words and should be used in the beginning. But English is not a phonetic language unfortunately so it’s a very limited tool. Don’t believe me? Try to read your own tweets using basic phonics as if you didn’t already know those words.”
And Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) tweet:
All these posts on 'Expose' are for posterity. Teachers post articles to mislead and when questioned do not reply. This is a big disservice to desperate parents with kids who can't read.
Here is a LinkedIn re-post by Kathleen Seeman (MEd Dyslexia Specialist and Interventionist, Master Teacher, Educator) of an article by Marnie Gindberg.
Marnie Ginsberg. Trusted by 16,000+ teachers, our evidence-based Reading Simplified system empowers school leaders to transform beginning and struggling readers into thriving ones—in weeks, not years.
A lot of what has been mainstream for decades in early literacy learning is inefficient and not in alignment with how the brain learns to read.
My thoughts:
Who in the world knows how the brain learns to read? LINK
This woman is trying to impress readers how the brain learns to read. Let us see if she will answer any of the questions in the link above.
Recently I posted a video broadcasted in over 100 countries that teaches the wrong sounds of the letters. Many toddlers listening to this video will shut down/disengage from decoding and blending. Those promoting this video claim it to be an entertainment video.
You can find the video here. LINK
I made a comment
According to some, this is an entertainment programme, not an educational one so it does not matter. These clowns have made many believe that kids can differentiate between what is entertainment and what is academic.
Is this how to teach the sounds of the letters? The British are the main culprits in creating 'dyslexic' kids.
Suri Charles commented as follows:
I recently shared some thoughts with Ethan Lynn regarding a pervasive issue in education: many educators struggle to understand why some children cannot read. They either don’t understand or refuse to accept that the reason is confusion caused by teaching consonants with extraneous sounds.
This brings to mind a response I received from some ‘experts’ in Australia in 2020 regarding phonics instruction. You can read more about it here. LINK
Many ‘educators’ from the US have blocked me but I can’t recollect any from the US who have blocked me and said things behind my back. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for some Australians and the British.
Recently I created a second account on Twitter and saw the following tweets from Peter Blenkinsop from the UK.
This guy is a secondary school teacher and has never taught kids to learn to read and yet argues with me about how to teach kids to learn to read.
There has been a heated Twitter discussion on when to teach letter names.
When the British came to Malaya they taught our teachers to teach us letter names first and then teach us letter sounds. This is what I practice in teaching my dyslexic students.
They taught us only one of the sounds of letters. They taught us A for apple; b for ball; C for cat and so on.
I surfed the net to see if I could find newspaper articles on dyslexic children in Japan and I chanced upon the following article about a dyslexic Australian boy in Japan.
The article is dated 10th July 1999. That was 10 years ago. You can read the full article here.
I have copied some of the salient points:
