The Real Mystery of Reading

 

Why Fluent Readers Are Not the Mystery. The Real Mystery Is Why Some Curious Children Shut Down.

 

A few weeks ago, I posed what I thought was a simple question on Substack:

                                Does anyone know how a child learns to read?

Rote memorisation of Dolch Words and Lesson 13.

 

Here are three video clips of a boy with dyslexia in Perth, Australia, reading Dolch high-frequency words from Lessons 1 to 6 of my book. He learned these words through rote memorisation.

High-frequency words (commonly known as Dolch words) are words that appear frequently in everyday language and especially in books for beginning readers. Examples include: the, went, she, you, see, to, like, and one.

A sight word refers to any word that a child has stored in their sight vocabulary — that is, a word they recognise and read instantly and automatically upon seeing it, without needing to decode it.

I explicitly teach all my students to rote-memorise these high-frequency words. In practice, the children repeatedly say the letter names (not the letter sounds) while learning them.

This approach contrasts with the position taken by many Science of Reading advocates, including literacy researchers Dr. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates (authors of Shifting the Balance). They recommend against memorising high-frequency words as wholes and instead emphasise explicitly teaching children to map individual speech sounds (phonemes) to letters or letter groups (graphemes) so they can decode words independently.

However, my students — including this boy with dyslexia — successfully memorised all 220 Dolch words by repeating the letter names. This outcome suggests that rote memorisation of high-frequency words remains an effective and practical strategy for many learners, even when it does not rely on phoneme-grapheme mapping.

Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from lessons 1 to 4

Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from Lesson 5

 Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from Lesson 6

 

 

My post from 2010 on Lesson 13 is unavailable.

Here is the link to lesson 13 from 2020.

https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/11/lesson-13-oat.html#more

Why Teachers, PhDs, and Even Skilled Readers Struggle to See the Real Cause of Reading Shutdowns

 

The Hidden Damage of Extraneous Sounds

For years, I've argued that one of the main reasons many intelligent children shut down or disengage from learning to read is the widespread practice of teaching letter sounds with extraneous sounds (e.g., "buh" for /b/, "duh" for /d/, "fuh" for /f/). These kids aren't "dyslexic" in the neurological sense—they're victims of confusing early input that their logical brains reject. A majority of such children get wrongly labeled as dyslexic. 

Bersama’s Bold Education Vision: Building Thinking Citizens from the Ground Up

 

Parti Bersama’s 12 agendas are ambitious, but three stand out immediately:  

Agenda 3 (Universal Early Education), Agenda 5 (Dual‑Track Higher Education), and Agenda 7 (STEM & PISA Performance). These aren’t just policy items — they treat education as the foundation of nation‑building.

Proof That Early Reading Works: A 4½-Year-Old’s Success Story

 

In 2020, before my book 'Teach Your Child to Read' was officially published, I decided to send a printed copy to a dear teacher friend of mine in Perth, Australia. Ms. Lena Loganathan had recently retired from full-time classroom teaching but was still actively tutoring senior high school students in Years 11 and 12. Knowing her passion for education, I was curious to hear her thoughts on the method. To my surprise and delight, Lena didn’t just read the book — she photocopied it and immediately put it into action. She encouraged her older tutoring students to use the lessons to teach younger children how to read. At that time, I had already been using the same structured approach successfully with dyslexic children in Grades 1 to 3, watching them gain confidence and make rapid progress.

Paul Thomas: Five Years On, Still "Navigating Research" on Why Kids Crack Nonsense Words Despite Flawed Phonics?

 

Prof. Paul L. Thomas (@plthomasEdD) of Furman University has long been a voice in the education wilderness—pushing back against the hype of "science of reading" mandates, defending balanced literacy, and calling out phonics zealots for oversimplifying complex kids. As a high school English teacher turned professor, his blog Radical Scholarship and tweets cut through the noise with data-driven skepticism. I've cited him approvingly in my own fights against PAD dogma and "cuh-ah-tuh" blunders. But when it comes to my core question—how do multilingual kids (and even fluent adults) nail nonsense words like "scrab" or "thake" despite kindergarten phonics gone haywire? —he's been radio silent. Or worse: a mute button.

Why the Reading Wars Persist: A Deeper Look at Shutdown Kids

 

I've stepped back from diving into why kids struggle with reading fluency—it's often like shouting into a void, where well-meaning educators echo the same tired lines without probing deeper. But this morning, an email landed in my inbox with Sam Bommarito's latest blog post, pulling me right back in. His reflections on the "reading wars" and the "science of reading" (SoR) movement are thoughtful, as always, but they skirt the core issue I've been hammering on for years: instructional confusion that causes kids to shut down entirely from learning to read.  

How a Dyslexia Teacher Teams Up with AI to Help Kids Read Better

 

Luqman Michel chats with Grok (xAI's Honest AI)

Imagine a dedicated teacher who's spent years fighting reading struggles in the classroom, especially for kids learning English alongside another language like Malay. Now picture him joining forces with an AI like me—Grok, from xAI. What do you get? Big "aha!" moments that clear up confusion. For months, Luqman and I've been digging into topics like the comeback of old-school phonics teaching (breaking words into sounds) and the "hidden cost" of kids forcing their brains to work around bad lessons on letter sounds. Our talks? A mix of debunking myths, spotting teaching traps, and worrying about the 20% of kids who just tune out when sounding out "buh-a-tuh" for "bat" doesn't click.

Red flags in education research - Anna Stokke with Ben Solomon (Part 2)

                                                               

Part one of this post can be found HERE.

[00:19:48] Anna Stokke: The point you made about this paper being used to influence policy for millions of kids, is quite alarming. Okay, so I'm going to say, you know, in Canada when that curriculum I was talking about was adopted and I'm not kidding you that for a while, teachers were told that children could not use standard algorithms in class. They were not to teach them and kids were not to use them, even if they've been taught at home.

Red flags in education research - Anna Stokke with Ben Solomon

 

The clip above is copied from Anna Stokke’s Tweet dated 28.1.2024. Anna is a math professor and has a podcast that will be useful for all those interested in Math. I have only listened in full to 2 of her podcasts and think it is one of the best podcasts I've heard.

Musings of a centrist by Dr. Sam Bommarito - Part 1

                                                              

'The question about phonics is not whether to teach phonics but rather what kind of phonics and how much phonics' - Dr. Sam Bommarito

Here are some of Dr. Sam’s key points from his article found here and my comments:

What works with one kid doesn’t always work with another. I make that a prior assumption/observation based on 50-plus years of teaching experience. During that time, I’ve taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school.

This is what the Western World keeps repeating without understanding what they talk about. As far as decoding is concerned what is it that doesn’t work with one kid but works with another?

Jennifer Serravallo and P.D. Pearson on phonics and reading

                                                                

Yesterday, 21.11.23 I read a blog post by Jennifer Serravallo. A large portion of the post was on comprehension. My blog focusses on decoding. I leave comprehension to experts like Jennifer.

Here are extracts and my comments.

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah, nobody denies how important phonics is, but if we're taking a ton of time, then that's the time kids aren't getting to practice other things like you said, fluency or having read aloud or getting to play with each other or all the many other things that they need to develop oral language and literacy skills and things like that.

When does one size fit all

                                                     

On 6.10.23 in a Twitter thread Dr. Sam Bommarito Twitted the following:

Dr. Sam Bommarito @DoctorSam7

One of the many reasons I speak out against one-size-fits-all solutions is that different children really do need different things. What works with one does not always work with another. Many adults who were Dyslexic as a child have found ways to succeed. One of my favorite stories along that line is the story of this mother and daughter team, who saw the strengths in themselves and shared with others how to use those strengths. They replace "succeeding despite of Dyslexia" with "succeeding because of Dyslexia". 

Dr. Sam keeps saying the same things over and over because, as I have said several times, the mind of most people is like the human egg. 

A 7 year old in Perth, in 2019, who was unable to read.

 

In 2019, I dispatched a few books to a teacher in Perth. She and a few teacher's helpers decided to teach using my books to see its effectiveness in teaching kids to read. Here is the video of one of her helpers who taught a 7 year old dyslexic child to read.

Unfortunately we were unable to continue due to Covid 19. My planned trip to Perth in early 2020 was cancelled.

The first video is of the kid learning to read with pictures to help him to read.

Right to read - Movie Review – Part 3

Minute 34.50: If they don’t know the sounds of the letters they are not going to know how to read.

 

This is nonsense propagated by the puppets of the powers that be.

The brain is powerful enough to figure out how to read despite not knowing the sounds of the letters. 

Different perspectives – Part 2 - PHONICS

I have said for many years that one of the reasons why many kids shut down/ disengage from learning to read is due to teaching the sounds represented by letters wrongly. A majority of these kids are wrongly classified as dyslexic.

Many educators have disagreed with me.

Let us examine the reason for the different perspectives.

Linkedin – Forum on how to teach reluctant and struggling readers- Final Part

                                                  

Jane

Individualistic views and opinions have no place in training teachers in the "science of reading".
There will be tremendous improvements when teachers gain this kind of training.
Phonemes are speech sounds.

My thoughts: I believe this is the problem. If the Science of Reading has been taught for the last donkey years why are there kids who shut down? Why has the rate of illiterate students leaving school not reduced since 1970?