The importance of combining phonics and whole language.

                          

Phillip Chipping and I have been discussing on LinkedIn for a few days. He asked me to send him 2 posts which I think are the top.

All my posts are worth reading but I thought I’d make a new post as there was another teacher, I discussed with who teaches phonics but does not understand why memorising Dolch words is important.

This is one of the problems with kids shutting down. The phonics proponents are adamant that kids should not rote memorise HFWs because it is based on Whole Language and the WL proponents think phonics is useless as many kids who have learned phonics can’t read.

Neither the phonics or the whole word advocates know why many kids shut down from learning to read. 

Naïve Ph.D’s (Part 2)

 

This is a continuation of my post on Gwendolyn Lavert. LINK

To a question on how she teaches High Frequency Words, Gwendolyn replied that she teaches kids to learn them by sight and patterns.

Luqman Michel

English words are not pictorial like Chinese characters and I teach my students to memorise them by rote memory. I explained what I meant by that.

How do you teach High Frequency Words? Which, where, here, who, like, there.

 

Note: Many teachers teach kids to memorise HFWs by sight. Then they complain kids can’t read. Why reduce an alphabetic language into a pictorial language?

How do you teach the above HFWs by patterns?

Expose (Part 3)

 

                                          The above was posted on LinkedIn by Brian Vieira.

Brian Vieira  President at Scholar Skills: Science of Reading consultant, curriculum creator, speaker, and founder of T.A.G. (The Academic Gym), which helps kids overcome dyslexia by combining multisensory academic and athletic skills.

Brian:

This is the incontrovertible truth that over seventy-five years of scientific reading research has taught us:

 

Luqman Michel

Can you please educate me on how thousands of kids and adults can recite the Quran by memory?

I have never said the Lord's prayer for the past 55 years. How is it possible for me to recite it today?

I learned the alphabet and the times table by memory more than 60 years ago. Did I analyse it?

Expose - Part 2

 

All these posts on 'Expose' are for posterity. Teachers post articles to mislead and when questioned do not reply. This is a big disservice to desperate parents with kids who can't read.

Here is a LinkedIn re-post by Kathleen Seeman (MEd Dyslexia Specialist and Interventionist, Master Teacher, Educator) of an article by Marnie Gindberg. 

Marnie Ginsberg.  Trusted by 16,000+ teachers, our evidence-based Reading Simplified system empowers school leaders to transform beginning and struggling readers into thriving ones—in weeks, not years.

A lot of what has been mainstream for decades in early literacy learning is inefficient and not in alignment with how the brain learns to read.

My thoughts:

Who in the world knows how the brain learns to read? LINK

This woman is trying to impress readers how the brain learns to read. Let us see if she will answer any of the questions in the link above. 

Expose – Part 1

 

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’. 

Pinyin taught wrongly in China

 

Here is a discussion on Quora that confirms my findings that Pinyin is taught wrongly. This explains why many kids in China and Malaysia today can’t read in Pinyin. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to comment.

Luqman Michel · Nov 3

Unfortunately, too many Chinese teachers from China are messing up Pinyin by teaching it wrongly. Here is one of many examples. Teachers from China screwing up Pinyin. LINK

Ethan Lynn, PhD, and Reading Horizons

As mentioned in my blog post yesterday, Ethan said that Reading Horizon teaches the word cat as follows:

At Reading Horizons, we use successive blending to eliminate the extraneous sounds often accompanying stop consonants.

For example, 'cat' would be reduced to 'ca' and then made into 'cat'. The vowel following the consonant necessarily eliminates those extra sounds.

What nonsense is Ethan Lynn and Reading Horizons disseminating to the masses?

Stacy Hurst of Reading Horizons - Blocked me when questioned.

 

My Twitter account says:

@StacyHurst15 has blocked you 

We will return to Gwendolyn but for now, let us discuss the following post on a current LinkedIn post.

In 2010 I disagreed with the theory that phonological awareness deficit is the cause of dyslexia (kids not being able to read) and wrote extensively until that theory was debunked in 2017. LINK

There are still many researchers bent on bringing that debunked theory alive. Here is a LinkedIn post by Ethan Lynn, Ph.D. on whose previous posts I said why this theory is incorrect. 

Naïve Ph.D’s (Part 1)

 

Dr. Gwendolyn Lavert

Her LinkedIn profile says: International Literacy/Leader Trainers Children's Author Bedford, Texas, United States

On 29.10.2024, I had a telephone discussion with Dr. Gwendolyn Lavert. She told me that she will question me on my book that she ordered on-line.

Today, 6.11.2024 I tried to send a message on Facebook and LinkedIn Messenger to no avail. Both messengers have been blocked. Our discussion in 2019 has been deleted. Fortunately, I had copied it before it was deleted.

Facebook has the following message:

Oct 29, 2024, 7:50 AM Gwen Lavert Audio call 47 mins

This person is unavailable on Messenger.

Who is responsible for suppressing research findings? (Part 1)

 

Siegfried Engelmann: Instructional Design 101: Learn from the Learners!

Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann was a Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, the Director of the National Institute for Direct Instruction, and President of Engelmann-Becker Corporation, which develops instructional materials and provides educational services for students with various needs.

Corroborative evidence to my post on Identifying Students at Risk in Grade 1(Part 4)

 

It is mind boggling why someone like Dr. Reid Lyon who claims that he was researching why many kids can't read did not want to discuss this extremely important matter with me. Read what he had to say in an interview in the Children of the Code. 

I gave him the magic bullet that he was looking for and yet his wife claimed he did not have the time to discuss.

Corroborative evidence to my post on Identifying Students at Risk in Grade 1 (Part 3)

 

Here is more evidence that researchers knew why kids struggle to read.

 

David Boulton - The interviewer of the Children of the Code:

10 times the number of kids who have innately biologically ordered learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned…... Until such time we can read that they are cognitively going askew relative to what they have learnt in the past then our teaching is kind of brute force against this deep core stuff that is working against us.

How much of what they are struggling with is an innate learning problem and how much of what they are struggling with is what they have learned in the past working against them learning now.

“But the key in both cases is to find out where they're at foundationally and then give them manageable steps into the confusion they can work through.”

Corroborative evidence to my post on Identifying Students at Risk in Grade 1 (Part 2)

 

In the Children of the Code the researchers discovered beyond a doubt why kids shut down from learning to read. This information is suppressed from the general public. Did someone direct them to suppress it. Seigfried Engelmann had asked this question why important matters are suppressed. 

Here is a small portion from the interview of Seigfried Engelmann by David Boulton. 

Corroborative evidence to my post on Identifying Students at Risk in Grade 1

 These is the first of many posts on Corroborative Evidence to Identifying Students at Risk in Grade 1.

Dr. Richard Selznick, my mentor, in my discussion with him in 2010 said:

I agree with you that many of these kids are instructional casualties and if they had been taught differently, many would not have shut down.

Most of my thousands of patients, who could not read, pronounced the consonants with extraneous sounds.

Please keep in mind that what I say and how I respond are based on my experiences and understanding of the research.  I am not a scientist or researcher, but respond from my decades of clinical experience.

Identifying At-Risk Students in grade 1

 

I am not a trained teacher, but in 2004, I found myself teaching a child who couldn’t read a single sentence after two years of school. Curious about this intelligent child’s struggles, I began researching the issue. I eventually worked with over 80 similar students and noticed a common pattern: each child was sounding out consonants with an extraneous sound.

By teaching them the correct consonant sounds, they started to read successfully. Many of my former students have since become professionals. I then began assisting parents concerned about their children's reading difficulties. I asked them to record their kids sounding out consonants and encouraged them to correct the pronunciations. Soon, those children also began to read.