Different perspectives – Part 3 – Memorising Dolch (High frequency) words.

 

I teach all my students to memorise the 220 Dolch words. I don’t use flash cards. Who introduced flash cards and why would one foolishly use it is beyond me. English is not pictorial or ideograph like the Chinese script. Even the Chinese script is not memorised by looking at it but by students writing a character a minimum of a hundred times.

I ask my students to list down the Dolch words, introduced in each lesson, in an exercise book and spell out each word five times before going down the list to the next word. Within a short period of time they are able to spell the words. If a kid who is going to vernacular school can learn to memorise 600 Chinese characters in a year what is the problem in memorising 220 HFW? 

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.

Different perspectives – Part 1

 

In the image above, some people can only see the young lady and some can see only the old woman. Very few can see both the young and old.

If you see a situation from one angle only, you see very little of it. Besides, while you may see a situation from one angle, others will see it from another.

Here are tweets between me and one guy called Kareem J. Weaver.

One of my former students who is now a science graduate

Yoshini Thiagarajan was one of my first students whom I wrote about in the first month I started blogging in February 2010. She had gone to kindergarten for 2 ½ years and was in the first few months in grade one when her desperate father brought her to me for tuition. He said he could not understand why his daughter had a reading problem.

When I taught her, she refused to say many words as they did not make sense to her. For instance, she repeated the word ‘ox’ after me but refused to sound out the word fox.

I later found out the reason as explained in my blog post here.

Testimonial from California

 

The following is an email from someone I met through a chat group. She contacted me and asked if I could help to teach her grandchildren.

I would like to thank Michel Luqman for all he has done to help my grandson Aidan who is 11 years old has an IEP with Dyslexia and was reading at a 3rd grade level and my granddaughter Lyla who is 8 years old and reading at a 1st grade or below level.  Both my grandkids live in Arizona and I am in California.

“one-size-fits-all” approach is not effective. (Dr. Sam Bommarito)

 

What reading research (the science of reading) has shown is that there are no differences in outcomes among the various approaches to teaching phonics and that a “one-size-fits-all” approach is not effective. (Dr. Sam Bommarito)

I have written several posts on the importance of teaching the correct sounds represented by letters.

Many of the teachers/ educators say that it is impossible to teach the sounds of consonants without extraneous sounds. They refuse to correct themselves when videos pronouncing the sounds correctly is produced. 

One guy says 'one size does not fit all' and everyone who reads that statement repeat it without the slightest bit of thought. They use this as an excuse for the reading levels maintained for the past more than 30 years.

Now, listen to the video clip here which teaches the correct pronunciation. There will be no kid left behind if teachers teach the pronunciation of sounds represented by letters in this manner.

A rehash of my emails to APM Reports and Emily Hanford

 

I wrote to APM reports on their article 'How American schools fail kids with dyslexia’ dated 11.9.2017.

 Their website says,

APM Reports strives to raise awareness, trigger debate and prompt positive change via non-partisan, independent investigative and documentary journalism.

The following is my email to APM Reports dated 11.9.2017

Photocopy of my books ‘Teach your child to read’

On 19.2.2023 a lady from San Francisco messaged me on FB messenger. She said that she saw my post on a chat site and liked what I said about teaching dyslexic kids. She added that she is looking for help as the school system has no idea how to teach her 11-year-old grandson.

She told me how her grandson sounded out the sounds represented by the letters and I knew that that was the problem with him not being able to read.

We exchanged WhatsApp numbers and soon after started to get her to follow my lessons on my blog.

She taught her grandson how to read and how to memorise the Dolch words following my blog posts and my YouTube videos.

Dr. Sam Bommarito’s common sense and my response (Part 3)

 

Test and retest reliability of research reports. 

When educators cannot respond to my questions they ask me for ‘data’ and ‘peer reviewed’ reports.

Dr. Katherine Garforth Twitted the following:

“I have a long list of papers & books to read that are peer-reviewed and published. I would be happy to read your posts if you pay me for my time.’ (Dr. Katherine Garforth).

What Greg Ashman wrote in his post is relevant:

‘…peer review is a relatively new idea. Pretty much all of the science we teach in school was developed in the absence of peer review and so to insist that it is a fundamental component of the scientific method is stretching things somewhat.’

Dr. Sam’s tweet on common sense and my response (Part 2)

 

On 23rd May, 2018 Emina McLean @EminaMcLean  Twitted the following:

If a child memorises ten words, the child can only read ten words, but if the child learns the sounds of ten letters, the child will be able to read 350 three sound words, 4,320 four sound words and 21,650 five sound words (Kozloff, 2002).

Luqman Michel:

Where did you get this nonsense from?

There was no reply.

Dyslexia Georgia @DyslexiaGeorgia

Twitted the same thing as Emina McLean.

Dyslexia Georgia has more than 1,400 followers and its website says, ‘The Children’s Dyslexia Center of Georgia, you will be taught by extremely qualified faculty members with many years of experience and expertise in Dyslexia.’

Dr. Sam Bommarito's tweet on common sense and my response (Part 1)

 

The following is a tweet by Dr. Sam.

What works for one child doesn’t always work for another child.

In the history of reading MANY have claimed to have found the answer – in the end their answers worked for some not all the kids.

“Let’s use common sense to find common ground.” Let’s recognize that what works with one child doesn’t always work with another.

Luqman Michel @luqmanmichel May 4

Dr. You are asking for something that does not exist in most people - common sense.

If common sense is common, then why have we been debating for decades without reaching a consensus?

I have said this before and say it again that Dr. Sam is one of a handful of educators that I have high a regard for.

Here is my explanation of why I said that common sense does not exist in most people.

Can a deaf person learn to read

 

How does a deaf person learn to read just as well as one who can hear?

Read the comment section of my post on ‘How the brain learns to read' – Dehaene Stanislas.

Here is another account by another deaf person who is able to read. This should put paid to Dehaene’s theory which says the following:

Reading requires specializing the visual system for the shapes of the letters, and connecting them to speech sounds.

Teaching letter-sound correspondences is therefore essential.

I have repeated several time for you to think rather than accepting whatever is said by so called experts such as Sally Shaywitz, Dehaene Stanislas, Andy Johnson, Timothy Shanahan, David Boulton, Sharon Vaughn and many others. 

New York Times and the Science of Reading

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html#commentsContainer

I read a report on Science of Reading in the New York Times dated 16.4.2023.

In the entire report there was no definition of the ‘Science of Reading.’

Why do we keep reinventing the wheel and come up with so-called discoveries which do not improve the level of reading?

Here are some extracts from the article in the New York Times and my comments.

New York Times:

The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.

Blocked on Twitter by Melanie Brethour @melbrethour

Melanie’s Twitter profile says:

Founder Decoding Dyslexia QUEBEC. SOAR WITH DYSLEXIA #CERI Structured Literacy Teacher. #OGA Mother to an amazing #dyslexic. Spreading awareness #dyslexia #sor

I clicked ‘like’ on many of her posts and it was accepted by her. However, when I queried her on some things that were wrong she blocked me.

I find many dyslexia proponents block me when they can’t answer questions.

This is a big disservice to desperate parents of dyslexic kids. 

High Frequency Words (HFW) and memorising

 

On 2.4.2023 I read a Tweet by Melanie Brethour @melbrethour as follows:

Memorizing words is not aligned with the research. Having students "memorize any whole words, including high frequency words, by sight without attending to the sound/symbol correspondences" is a red flag. @reading_league