Precisely because our local environment leans heavily syllabic, teaching pure, clipped, individual letter sounds is the critical bridge our students need to conquer English.
In a syllable-based language environment, students naturally look for vowel anchors. If we teach them that a consonant includes an additional vowel sound, we distort the actual building blocks of decoding.
I posted a Substack note on Paul Thomas’s post and he referred me to another post of his.
I think Paul has finally framed the issue in a way that allows for a more productive discussion. Rather than arguing over whether there is a "reading crisis," he is asking deeper historical questions.
Here is my response:
Why credential talk keeps children illiterate while real questions go unanswered.
For more than a decade, I have asked direct questions about why intelligent children fail to read in English while succeeding in languages like Malay and Pinyin. Again and again, the responses I receive from educators and academics are evasive. They speak of expertise, developmental science, or research-based practice — but they rarely, if ever, confront the substance of the questions.
Dr. Lynne Kulich, drawing on Timothy Shanahan’s recent writing on decodable texts, describes set for variability as the ability to adjust a pronunciation when the first decoding attempt does not make sense. A child applies a phonics pattern, notices the word does not fit the sentence, and tries again using syntax and meaning. Shanahan’s point is that English is not perfectly consistent, and overly predictable texts can obscure the flexibility skilled readers actually use.
Scroll below to see the LinkedIn post by Dr. Lynne Kulich.
A common observation from Chinese primary teachers is striking: a substantial number of Grade 1 and 2 pupils can write characters correctly from dictation, yet they falter when asked to read or write accurately from Pinyin by itself. Accuracy with less familiar or novel syllables remains weak.
This pattern helps explain why some observers feel that today’s pupils handle pure Pinyin less confidently than cohorts a decade or more earlier. Several factors are at work.
In the intense global debate surrounding the "Science of Reading," a single narrative has taken root: The Phonological Deficit Hypothesis. Mainstream reading experts argue that an inherent Phonological Awareness Deficit (PAD) is the primary neurobiological cause of dyslexia. If a child cannot blend sounds to read words, the diagnosis almost default-points to a broken internal phonological processor.
But what happens when we look outside the English-speaking world?
To clarify: This isn’t a defense of traditional Whole Language or a call to abandon phonics. Millions of children successfully learned to read under both eras, and literacy failure rates remained remarkably stagnant across both periods.
The real point is that the mainstream Science of Reading has mistaken English’s chaotic complexity for a universal human limitation. Our brains are incredibly powerful statistical learning engines. When a writing system is consistent, the mind finds the patterns naturally without an agonizing, mechanical grind.
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.
Since 2004, I have been teaching children labelled "dyslexic" to read English by stripping away the "noise." I have seen time and again that when you remove extraneous sounds—like teaching 'b' as "buh"—the "dyslexia" often vanishes within weeks.
Now, we are seeing the exact same disaster unfold with Pinyin.
The Death of Clean Pinyin
Welcome to Part 6 of How to Teach Dyslexic Kids! We’re building directly on the finger-blocking method from Part 5. Once your student has solid success with ee (the long /ē/ sound), it’s time to introduce more common vowel teams and digraphs. This keeps the momentum going while systematically expanding their ability to decode thousands of new words.
Vowel teams (two or more letters working together to make one sound) are a frequent sticking point for dyslexic learners because English spelling is inconsistent. Explicit practice with the blocking technique turns confusion into confidence.
Here are extracts from the talk-show by YB Khairy Jamaluddin.
Malaysia’s grade inflation debate misses the deeper crisis: failing to identify and support intelligent children who struggle with reading early on. Until literacy reform takes priority, more A’s will mean less progress.
We are getting more A’s but our international Benchmarking is getting worse.
Is it because of grade inflation?
These are all views and comments that we hear but no one is incentivized to touch this because parents, students, teachers and the education industry, we have a huge tuition industry, everyone is incentivized to just continue to churn As, and not actually sit down and say, ’Hey, wait a minute, more A’s but Benchmark Internationally we are still doing badly’.
For decades, dyslexia has been framed as a disability rooted in phonological deficits. Yet my years of teaching show a different reality: many bright, healthy children struggle not because of innate flaws, but because they are taught the wrong sounds of letters. This initial confusion snowballs. English’s inconsistent spelling system only makes matters worse, while these same children read fluently in Malay or Romanized Mandarin — proof that the issue lies in method, not mind.
For over fifteen years I have been saying the same thing: the vast majority of children labelled “dyslexic” in English-speaking countries are not dyslexic at all. They are intelligent kids who shut down because they were taught reading in a way that created confusion. Once the confusion is removed, they read. I have seen it happen with more than eighty children I taught one-to-one between 2004 and 2019.Yet every year the numbers keep rising. In the US, UK, Australia and many other places, 10 % to 20 % of children are now being told they have dyslexia. That cannot be right. A real neurobiological condition that affects the way the brain processes spoken sounds should not suddenly explode to one in five children just because we changed the way we label it.
Singapore shows us the truth. The Singapore Evidence:
A Learner's Frustration with Pronunciation and Tones
As someone who's spent years navigating the world of dyslexia and education—teaching kids labeled as dyslexic and authoring insights on why so many struggle with reading—I've come to appreciate how crucial clear, accurate instruction is in any language learning journey. In my recent blog post, "Unlocking the Potential of China's Dyslexic Students (Part 1)," I delved into the literacy challenges in Chinese schools, where a persistent 20-25% of students disengage due to confusion from flawed teaching methods. There, I highlighted how mixing Pinyin with Bopomofo initial sounds creates unnecessary hurdles: "Curious intelligent kids in China are confused when they cannot blend pinyin finals with bopomofo initials." This mirrors a broader issue I've encountered in my own pursuit of Mandarin fluency—frustrations with podcasts aimed at learners that butcher tones and pronunciation, undermining the language's inherent beauty and clarity.
A Balanced Approach to Teaching Reading to Dyslexic Students
In a recent LinkedIn post, reading consultant Brian Vieira argued strongly against sight word or whole word instruction, calling it the “worst way” to teach reading. He emphasized the superiority of phonics-based methods, pointing to the vast number of English words, the finite set of speech sounds, and scientific evidence favoring sound processing over memorization.
The dominant view, repeated endlessly in Western research, is that dyslexia is a neurobiological phonological processing deficit. But in 2010, I began questioning this after teaching children who struggled severely with English yet read fluently in transparent orthographies like Malay and Pinyin.
If a child truly has a phonological deficit, shouldn’t it impair reading in any alphabetic system? Yet these same children decoded Malay and Pinyin effortlessly.
Here is my response to a Substack post on decodables.
While it’s true that not all struggling readers have the same needs, the statement “many struggling readers have phonics gaps” significantly understates the real issue for a large proportion of children.
After leaving a career in accounting in 2004 to investigate why some children read easily in Malay (a transparent orthography) but struggle severely in English, I found that the primary barrier for most persistent struggling readers is not a lack of phonics instruction per se, but the initial confusion caused by imprecise or inconsistent teaching of letter–sound relationships.
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:
Why I am writing This Series
Since 2010, I’ve blogged about reading instruction, dyslexia, and phonics—always grounded in facts and student outcomes. I’ve taught over 80 children labeled as dyslexic, and I’ve shared what works, freely and openly.
This new three-part series marks a shift. It’s not just about methods—it’s about why those methods get blocked.
I’ve been silenced, ignored, and blocked by educators, researchers, and influencers—not because my results are flawed, but because they challenge the consensus. These posts explore the motives behind that resistance: profit, herd mentality, and gatekeeping.
I’m not here to attack individuals. I’m here to ask:
“Why block a question? What does that say about openness to debate?”
If we want to solve illiteracy, we must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths. This series is my invitation to do just that.
It's been years since I first noticed the pattern: educators, researchers, and self-proclaimed literacy experts on Twitter (now X), LinkedIn, and beyond, blocking me not for harassment or threats, but for daring to question their sacred cows. As the founder of free online lessons that have helped dozens of children—many mislabelled as "dyslexic"—read fluently in under four months, I've become a thorn in their side. My crime? Pointing out that phonological awareness deficit isn't the root cause of reading struggles; it's the confusion from teaching consonants with extraneous vowel sounds like "buh" instead of pure /b/. Kids shut down, disengage, and get funneled into expensive interventions. But why block the messenger?
Please share my book 'with parents who have kids who can't read. https://payhip.com/b/ZV01D
For years, I’ve taught children labeled as “dyslexic” who couldn’t read a single sentence in English—yet could read fluently in Malay and pinyin. That contradiction sparked my journey. What I discovered was simple, powerful, and deeply misunderstood: these children weren’t dyslexic. They were confused.
