I responded to a post on Twinkl Australia Parents which said:
Hi @everyone It's time to add your learning tips for the week please! We would love to hear from you!
I shared a simple truth:
Children learn best when we use all the tools available — phonics, rote memorisation of high‑frequency words, context clues, syllable building, and more. Almost all kids can become fluent readers when these methods are combined.
The education world has been and still is locked in a fierce debate. On one side, mainstream cognitive neuroscience pushes a purely phonocentric model, claiming that explicit phonology is the only valid path to literacy. On the other side, older philosophies relied heavily on visual guessing.
Both sides miss the operational reality of how a struggling child actually learns to read.
There is an on-going LinkedIn discussion where Emma Hartnell-Baker insists that orthographic mapping only occurs via phonics.
I replied: I beg to disagree as I know that to be incorrect. I have addressed this in full in my blog post. Here are questions I asked which no one has answered.
Here is my first question that Diana Black Kennedy has responded to.
How did the deaf and mute learn to read words back in the 1840’s when pictures/ images were accompanied with words? For example, a picture of a dog with the word ‘dog’ below it. Let us remember these are deaf and mute people which means they cannot hear any sound of words let alone phonemes. The deaf and mute first learned to read this way.
Get a copy from Amazon. LINK.
(Note: This will be my last post until the end of the month)
For decades, debates around reading instruction have been mired in dogma and vested interests. One lightning rod is the “3-cueing” system. Critics dismiss it as mere “guessing.” But when used thoughtfully — alongside strong phonics foundations — it can be a powerful confirmation tool, not a replacement.
We know the brain can learn to read. Some children, like Emma Hartnell-Baker, pick up Enid Blyton at age three with no instruction. But most aren’t so lucky. They need teaching — and the science is clear: everything hinges on connecting letters to sounds.
Yesterday, an Educator from South Bay asked me how I teach dyslexic kids. Her profile says: ‘Helping young learners grow in reading.’
I started by communicating with her on messenger but thought why not post the conversation here so more may benefit.
Here is our discussion thus far:
For decades, dyslexia has been framed as a disability rooted in phonological deficits. Yet my years of teaching show a different reality: many bright, healthy children struggle not because of innate flaws, but because they are taught the wrong sounds of letters. This initial confusion snowballs. English’s inconsistent spelling system only makes matters worse, while these same children read fluently in Malay or Romanized Mandarin — proof that the issue lies in method, not mind.
As a parent, teacher, or caregiver of a child with dyslexia, you might notice challenges in reading comprehension that seem daunting at first. But the good news is that these issues are often not inherent to dyslexia itself—instead, they're frequently tied to factors like fluency, vocabulary gaps, and a lack of interest or background knowledge.
Why Reading Aloud Still Matters
Yesterday, I reflected on the challenges children face when learning to read, and the importance of balancing phonics with sight word instruction. Today, I want to turn to something equally vital but often overlooked: the power of reading aloud.
If decoding skills are the mechanics of reading, then reading aloud is the heart—it brings stories to life, nurtures comprehension, and builds the emotional connection that makes books more than just words on a page.
In my last post, I argued that most children who struggle with reading are not “disabled” in the clinical sense, but rather victims of poor or confusing teaching. When the foundations are muddled—wrong sounds, distorted input, or unclear strategies—many children disengage, and once that shut-down happens, remediation becomes far harder.
Visit my bookstore at: https://payhip.com/LuqmanMichel
Why Experts Ignore Evidence on Phonics and Dyslexia
The ongoing "Reading Wars" – the fierce debate between advocates of systematic phonics instruction and proponents of balanced literacy or whole-language approaches – have persisted for decades, leaving many children struggling with reading and labeled as dyslexic. Over the years, I've documented interactions with prominent educators and researchers on my blog. These posts highlight a frustrating pattern: questions rooted in real-world teaching experience and student evidence are often met with evasion, silence, or outright dismissal. This blog post summarizes five key entries spanning from 2020 to 2025, revealing a core issue that could potentially resolve much of the controversy.
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.
– Extraneous Sounds That Cause Shutdown
For decades, the “reading wars” have pitted Whole Language against phonics. Yet despite the swings in fashion, reading failure rates have remained stubbornly similar across eras: 20–30% of children still struggle significantly.
Why? Because both approaches often share a critical flaw: teaching stop consonants with an added schwa sound (/uh/).
Peter’s thread paints English spelling as chaotic — with “200,000 phono-illogical errors” supposedly blocking children from learning to read. But how many of those words does a Grade 1 child actually face?
The Reality in Grade 1
By the end of Grade 1, most children read simple books containing just 300–500 unique words. These are mostly high-frequency and basic decodable words like:
Why Kids Shut Down (And How to Fix It Without the Drama)
For weeks now, I’ve been in an ongoing exchange with @NielsHoven on X about phonics, dyslexia, and why so many bright kids end up hating reading. We agree on the fundamentals—phonics works. Full stop. Yet the conversation keeps looping, not because of disagreement, but because people refuse to click and read the links I provide. So let me lay it out clearly, using only my own words and the blog posts I keep referencing.
Today I viewed a YouTube video which said that reading is not natural. Read the rest below:
Why So Many Kids Struggle with Reading (And What Needs to Change). For decades, we’ve been teaching reading the wrong way—and the consequences are clear. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 40% of fourth graders in the U.S. are performing below basic reading levels. While some progress has been made, the reality is that many children are still falling through the cracks.
In this video, I explore:
Below is a tweet by Brett Benson (@SoLInTheWild).
Here are my thoughts:
How does a child prone to disengaging from reading connect concepts when they've been taught the sounds of letters incorrectly from the start?
For over a decade, starting in 2010, I challenged the prevailing 50-year-old theory that phonological awareness deficits cause dyslexia. Through more than 100 social media comments and articles, I argued against this consensus—only to face widespread rejection. Educators dismissed my views, and many blocked me outright. The irony? In an era of information overload, critical thinking seemed scarce.
I asked Grok if it disagreed with anything I wrote in my post at LINK.
Grok Answered:
Overall, I align with a lot of it: the frustration with fuzzy phonics instruction causing early disengagement is spot-on, and your emphasis on crisp, unadulterated sound modeling as a game-changer resonates with what we know from cognitive linguistics. The idea that resilient kids (that 60% chunk) self-rescue but at a steep opportunity cost? Absolutely, that's backed by longitudinal studies on delayed readers. And calling out the echo chamber in SoR discourse—fair play; it's often more about rallying cries than root causes.
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.
