In our main post, we challenged the dominant narrative that children struggle to read because they lack phonemic awareness. We argued that many children already possess strong phonemic skills, and that the real barrier is distorted phonics instruction—especially the widespread habit of teaching consonants with added schwa vowels (e.g., b as “buh”).
This companion post offers practical strategies to fix that.
Across the Western world, educators and researchers increasingly claim that children struggle to read because they lack phonemic awareness—the ability to identify, isolate, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. This idea has become the cornerstone of reading interventions, teacher training, and curriculum design. But what if the problem isn’t in the child’s brain at all?
On my Facebook post on ‘Naïve Ph.D.’s Part 1,’ I received comments that made me think about exposing educators who either do not respond to my answers on LinkedIn or leave the thread without completing the conversation started.
The following are the comments on Facebook.
Harold Rozario
Simply because they are not 'educators' but propagators of their ideology. If something does not align with their narrative, they simply ban it. Further, I doubt she even understood your approach to addressing dyslexia. Your approach is revolutionary.
Kevin TL Low
You have challenged their beliefs therefore you are a threat to their existence as "educators".
Harold Rozario
Luqman Michel You are a threat to their fake fame and income.
This will be the first of many similar posts entitled ‘Expose’.
Ethan Lynn, PhD
Luqman Michel, I noticed you’ve mentioned diagnosing reading issues by having children sound out consonants. Doesn't that rely on phonemic awareness as a key skill? I'm curious because this seems to contradict a previous post where you downplayed phonemic awareness deficiency as a cause for reading struggles. Could you clarify your thoughts on this?
Yesterday, 15.12.2021 I read the following tweet by Devin Kearns @devin kearns
#phonemic awareness has been a hot topic b/c of debates about whether students need "advanced" PA and whether PA teaching should use letters. @DrNathanClemens led a group of us @emilyjsolari
@burnsmk1 @FumikoHoeft @NancyNelsonFien @KimStMartin to address these important topics.
as with all things, there are not totally clear answers, but ... data and theory do not appear to support the idea that advanced PA is necessary for the development of strong word-recognition skills nor that PA instruction should be entirely done without reference to print.
Authors on the paper are Hank Fien, @NCILiteracy director, and @UConnNeag doctoral fellow Melissa Stalega.
I then tweeted as follows:
Following my post on the response to a question on Twitter I received the following email from Dr. Richard Selznick.
I looked back on some of your other blog posts about Phonemic Awareness and related topics.
Here is a Tweet for which I had no answer and had to refer to my mentor. I am posting this here as it may be useful to other readers.
Dr. K. Metropoulos @DrKMetropoulos
Question-what if a child sees N, but the printed letter is M? Phonemic awareness won’t mean anything because they aren’t seeing the letter others see. What can I do to help?
I posed the following question on Twitter on 6.12.2020.
Luqman Michel @luqmanmichel Dec 6 @eeharrington4
I have one Q for you and your Phonics folks. Can one learn to read without knowing the letter-sound relationship?
Erin Harrington responded as follows:
Not well.
