My Journey Fighting Illiteracy

                                                                

Enough is Enough – The Gatekeeping Must Stop

After more than 15 years tutoring dyslexic and struggling readers one-on-one – watching kids light up when confusion clears and they finally read fluently – I'm done holding back.

I've poured my observations into this blog since 2010, only to face silence, blocks, and herd-like defensiveness from the "experts" in the Science of Reading (SoR) and structured literacy world. Parents are desperate, kids are suffering needless disengagement, and yet the echo chambers on Twitter/X rage on, protecting egos, products, and flawed dogmas. It's time to call it out plainly: We're creating "dysteachia" – preventable reading failure through poor instruction – and mislabeling it as incurable dyslexia. And the gatekeeping? It's a big disservice to every child who could thrive with simpler, common-sense fixes.

The Silencing of Dissent: Why the Dyslexia Establishment Keeps Blocking Me Part 3 of 3

 

Gatekeeping, Credentials, and the Fear of Accountability

 

Recap: What They Block

Parts 1 and 2 exposed the profit motives and herd-driven hit squads that silence my evidence-based solutions:

 

✅ Teaching pure /b/ instead of "buh"

 

✅ Free lessons over multimillion-dollar curricula

 

✅ Student success over PAD myths

 

But the ugliest motive? Gatekeeping.

Learning to Read - Richard Gentry - Part 2

 

Here is the article referred to in Karen Vaite’s tweet.

The following are extracts from the article.

 

It takes time—grapheme by grapheme from left to right; Dehaene says, “Beginners need to be told how it works.” Here's an example. Effortful analysis of a word such as rat, along with active engagement and feedback from the teacher, might require the first grader’s teacher to employ modeling and prompts in word study lessons,

Teacher: “Today, we will be learning and listening to our new words for this week. Listen to all the sounds, and then you say the word after me. Ready? The first word is rat. Rrraaat. Rat.”

 

Yes, this is how I teach my students. Listen to how my son pronounces the sounds of the letters in the first lesson found here.

My question to all the educators is why many kids in classes teaching sounds of letters without extraneous sounds as illustrated by Dehaene, Sue Lloyd and Stephen Parker still end up with kids being unable to read like the majority? 

Blind leading the blind on Orthographic Mapping

 

On 16.2.2022 Maggie Downie Tweeted the following:

Maggie Downie 💙#takebackbritain@MaggieDownie Replying to @JoAnneGross1 and @ReadingShanahan'

'Also, OM (Orthographic Mapping) occurs when readers view a written word while hearing it pronounced' (Maggie quoting Ehri)

This is bizarre.  This is Look and Say stuff.

Orthographic Mapping by Stephen Parker (Part 3 of 3)

 

                                                                   ANGLOSPHERE

 

Stephen Parker:

The limiting factor on reading comprehension for most children in the initial two years of instruction is not language comprehension, it’s their inability to quickly recognize the words on the page. This can only be remedied by explicit and skilled instruction involving the distal factors that directly impact word recognition, that is, letter-sound correspondences, decoding, and the phonemic awareness skill of blending. As children begin to master these distal factors, the orthographic mapping that enables automatic sight word creation gets underway.

Orthographic Mapping by Stephen Parker (Part 2)

 

The extracts below are from the post by Stephen Parker found here.

“We take no position on whether there are one or more ultimate causes of dyslexia. But we suggest that there is a common denominator in every case of dyslexia… an inability to decode. This is not to say that we claim to have identified the ultimate cause of dyslexia; for this, one would have to push the question one step back and ask why they cannot decode.”  [12] (Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986).)

Orthographic Mapping by Stephen Parker (Part 1)

 

Here are extracts of an article by Stephen Parker and my comments. You may read the article here.

I have decided to break this up into bite sized posts.

Stephen Parker:

Orthographic mapping is the connection-making process that automatically creates sight words – words that are simply recognized at a glance, with decoding no longer necessary.

The connections that need to be made, according to Ehri, are between the letters seen in a word’s spelling and the sounds (phonemes) heard in that word’s pronunciation. This is precisely what decoding (sounding out) a word accomplishes. For most students, decoding a word successfully 2-5 times creates a new sight word.

Why insist on research reports for everything?

 

I read a well written blog post by Lindsay Kemeny. Here are extracts and my comments on the article. (LINK)

 

I have always tried to be careful with how I bring this up, because people get so upset and defensive when confronted with the fact that there is no research to support these reading strategies and, even worse, they are doing harm to students. But my patience is wearing thin on this topic. Just when I think that the tide is turning and that the majority of educators now realize the problems surrounding 3 cueing, I hear an edu-celebrity tell teachers on Facebook to simply “tweak” the strategies instead of get rid of them or a reader emails me asking me to take down this post stating that it’s only my opinion and that 3 cueing works. This particular reader told me not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but 3 cueing is exactly what needs to be thrown out. I stand by what I said. There is no research to support these strategies and you don’t need to take my word for it. You can read about it here, here, and here.

 

Witch hunt? (Part 1)

 

Here is a tweet by londonjohn on 5.10.2020

As I've said before, if you are right then relax in what you're doing as truth will prevail. You don't need to go on a witch hunt trying to destroy others who are helping kids read. (London John).

John Walker and Stephen Parker vs. Luqman Michel on letter names.

John Walker, in his weblog had a post in June 2019 titled ‘Advocating the teaching of letter names to children just entering school is crass’.

You may read the whole post here.

https://theliteracyblog.com/2019/06/24/advocating-the-teaching-of-letter-names-to-children-just-entering-school-is-crass/

Why would any sane person call teaching letter names to children just entering school as crass?

The "Sine Qua Non" of Reading Acquisition (Stephen Parker)

I happened to read an article by Stephen Parker on Reading Acquisition which you can read here.

Here are some extracts and my comments.

“The Era of Stupid” Michael A Cohen

The title above and this post is inspired by a post on Diane’s blog.

Here are extracts from Diane Ravitch’s blog post on 21.5.2020.

"Did balance literacy fail to teach your child to read"( P.L.Thomas)

Here are more extracts from P.L.Thomas’s article and my comments.

“Here we have a serious problem because at no period in the U.S. has anyone pronounced reading achievement to be satisfactory…

Yet, most of us view education as a 100% attainable venture—all students can and should learn to read by X age. This is a valuable ideal, but it certainly isn’t a reasonable measure for any sort of accountability (see the disaster that was No Child Left Behind).”

"I am capable of navigating research". (Professor P.L. Thomas)

P. L. Thomas is a Professor at Furman University.

He said on his Twitter message on 7.4.2020 - ‘I have a doctorate and I know that I do *not* know everything even though I am capable of navigating research.’

Stephen Parker - Phonics proponent Part 2

I know Stephen Parker is teaching phonics accurately. If phonics is taught the way he does then for sure there will be no kid disengaging from learning to read.

Stephen Parker – Phonics in isolation proponent (Part 1)

On 27 March 2020, I was blocked by Stephen Parker from Twitter. It was he who added me and then he removed himself which does not bother me. However, it would be nice to know the reason.