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.
