Evening News: Narelle Lynch and the Transferability Tango – Context Over Code in Australia's Literacy Waltz

 

Different Perspectives: Tweets That Echo Across Continents

 

Good evening, readers. The reading wars don’t respect borders — they leap from U.S. threads to Aussie classrooms faster than a kangaroo on caffeine.

 

Tonight’s dispatch takes us Down Under to Narelle Lynch, a 19-year veteran teacher from Australia whose tweets on phonics pitfalls and the power of context have fueled fierce exchanges since 2020. Trained by the THRASS Institute — a multi-sensory literacy framework blending phonics, morphology, and more — Narelle champions a holistic approach: grammar, syntax, etymology, and real-world transferability over isolated sound drills.

Response by Pat Stone to my post yesterday

 

My post yesterday and this post should confirm that most teachers are unaware of the different sounds represented by letters. I am not basing this only on the 4 teachers involved in the Twitter discussion but on many other teachers I had discussed this with over the last 10 years via emails, on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Face Book. 

Three cueing system

 

I believe most schools today teach phonics in one form or another. Unfortunately, many schools have these hard core three cueing system proponents, who have not mastered how to teach phonics correctly, who also teach kids how to guess.

Instead of sounding out words, the three cueing system proponents teach kids to rely on syntax, semantic, or grapho- phonemic cue by looking at the beginning letter of words.

Reading to respond instead of reading to understand

 

I commented on a tweet by Pam Kastner which was responded by Erin Harrington, Narelle Lynch, Denyse Ritchie and David M. (a grade one teacher in Australia), Dr. Kathryn Garforth and Emily Hanford.

When I clicked on ‘Home’ to skim through what others were tweeting I saw a tweet (in no way related to the tweet above) by Jasmine lane @MsJasmineMN, a teacher.

Too many folks out here reading to respond instead of reading to understand.

Misleading statements by Pam Kastner and more

 

The following is a Twitter discussion/debate I witnessed on 23.11.2020.

It started off with Pam Kastner making a sweeping statement. I asked a simple question based on what she had said and she has not responded. (I am told by a good Twitter friend that no one needs to respond to any questions asked. See note below.)

Decoding and comprehension

 

Here are some tweets from 29.11.2020 which I rather not respond on Twitter as the person twitting has not responded to my rebuttals ever.

denyse Ritchie @dejaynjd Replying to @eeharrington4 @NarelleLynch1 and 2 others

Is it ‘decoding’ or reading comprehension the year 4 slump is exposing? Many children can read but it is their lack of vocabulary understanding & spelling/writing skills that is failing them.

My 2018 prediction coming true?

 

On August 22 Narelle Lynch from Australia tweeted about Australia’s recent dramatic decline in literacy. I was not able to read the supporting article as I am not a subscriber. It is found here. 

And today 25.8.2020 I read a similar article about kids turning off reading in New Zealand. You may read it here.

Analogical reasoning

The following is a tweet by me to Sue Lloyd Replying @NarelleLynch1 and @RobertSlavin

Here is another video clip in this post where the phonemes represented by letters are read wrongly and yet the university student in Australia is able to read the nonsense words easily.

https://dyslexiafriend.com/2020/04/idiotic-statement-by-dr-robert-slavin.html

Is she reading using SSP or by analyses?

Definition of grapheme and phoneme

I believe I now know why I have been getting lukewarm reception of educators in the US, the UK and Australia. I believe most of them do not understand what I mean when I say that the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants is not taught correctly.

  You cannot teach phonics of any kind if the pronunciation of phonemes is taught wrongly. 

Sound symbol skills + Oral blending ability = Basic phonics skills.