When Malay Comes First, English Reading Can Collapse — Unless Teachers Explain the Difference

 

Children who learn to read Malay in kindergarten and only meet English in Year 1 often run into sudden, confusing difficulty. The problem is rarely a lack of intelligence. It is a clash of two writing systems that look similar but work very differently.

The Phonics Trap: How Extraneous Sounds Cause Children to "Shut Down"

 

We often wonder why so many children—especially those diagnosed with dyslexia—struggle for years to acquire basic literacy. The common consensus blamed the child's brain, assuming they had a fundamental deficit in phonological processing.

But my decades of teaching experience, combined with an extraordinary case of a single bilingual child, proved a completely different reality: Children aren't failing to learn; they are shutting down because of how they are taught.

Specifically, they are shutting down because teachers around the world are unknowingly sabotaging them with extraneous sounds.

Letter Names Matter: Why the “Don’t Teach Letter Names” Narrative is Failing Our Kids

Some belief systems have become so deeply ingrained in educators and policymakers that no amount of real-world experience or evidence seems to shake them. One of the most persistent is the claim that kids don’t need to know letter names to learn to read — and that teaching them can even make reading harder.

This idea circulates widely on social media and in teacher training circles. Yet every state still lists naming letters as a kindergarten standard. The result? Generations of children, particularly those with dyslexia or other reading challenges, continue to fall through the cracks.

The Preventable Majority: Why Most “Dyslexic” Kids Aren’t – And Singapore Proves It

 

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:

Dyslexia myth

 

One of the blog writers had written the following in her blog:

“Myth 5: People with dyslexia see things backwards.

Fact: Dyslexia is not caused by a vision problem, although reading difficulties very often are. Children need to have their eyes (and ears) checked regularly – and if there is a reading problem make sure the optometrist knows this. There are lots of exercises and strategies that can be used. If these sort the reading problem out, then the difficulty is not likely to be dyslexia.