Part 1: Why Children Shut Down When Learning to Read

 

The Hidden Trigger Behind Reading Failure

“Ten times the number of kids who have innately biologically ordered learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned.” — Dr. David Boulton

 

For years, I’ve taught children labeled as dyslexic—children who were disengaged, confused, and often branded as lazy or stupid. But what I’ve seen in my one-on-one sessions tells a different story. These children aren’t broken. They’re confused. And that confusion is often caused by how they were taught to read.

Why would kids taught pinyin with Bopomofo sounds shut down

                                                            

A Chinese friend says he does not understand why I say that kids taught pinyin using Bopomofo sounds may cause them to shut down from learning to read in Pinyin and English.

I have explained this in detail in my book Shut Down Kids. This post is for those who have not read my book or the posts in this blog.

Many of the kids who are classified as dyslexic are intelligent kids who disengage/shut down from learning to read. They shut down from learning to read due to confusion. The main reason for their confusion is the teaching of consonants with extraneous sounds. This means the sound that is not part of the consonants but added by teachers.

Unmotivated and disengaged students

 

I surfed the internet to find articles on disengaged students and here is an extract from one of many articles. All the ones I read had similar points of view but none had the main reason why kids disengage from learning to read.

Promotion without mastering the 3R’s (Part 4 of 4)

We are born ignorant but we have to work hard to remain stupid. (Benjamin Franklin)

Many professors in LinkedIn indeed are working very hard.

To teach or not to teach - Phonics

                                                                     

One of my first students, a girl refused to say the word fox despite being repeatedly asked to repeat after me. I have written about this in my article dated 17th February 2010. Children prone to disengaging shut down when something illogical is taught to them.

My student refused to say the word fox as she had learnt from her former tuition teacher that the sound for the letter 'f' is “Fur/Fer”. As such, to her, the word fox cannot be sounded out the way I had sounded it out. If the alphabet ‘F’ carried the sound fer/fur then the word ‘fox’ must be sounded out as ‘fur-ox’. As such she had refused to say it the way I had pronounced it.

Now, I would have expected this kind of wrong teaching of letter sounds in countries where English is taught as a second language. However, I just found out that it is rampant in the US, Australia and the UK too. No wonder the rate of illiteracy in these countries is on the increase.