Luqman's musings

There is another comment on Nitu Bhojwani’s original post that I would like all readers to ponder over.  “ It's always the struggle between what is right and what is presumed to be right. Sigh!”   The commenter above has hit the nail on the head. As mentioned in my previous article, 40 years ago, one professor had said that ‘Phonological awareness deficit is the cause of dyslexia’ (loosely kids who are unable to read) and more than 100 professors had echoed it without thinking. All these professors had ‘presumed that statement to be right.’ 

Recently I engaged in a discussion on a post by a friend, Nitu Bhojwani on LinkedIn. I made a few comments and thought that this will be an excellent material for a post in my own blog. Here is a definition of assertiveness from the internet:  ‘ Assertiveness is a skill regularly referred to in social and communication skills training. Being assertive means being able to stand up for your own or other people's rights in a calm and positive way, without being either aggressive, or passively accepting 'wrong'.’

Here is Ms Sue Lloyd's response to my first email. She is a committee member of the Reading Reform Foundation UK. 16 Nov at 17:14 Dear Luqman Michel, Thank you for your interesting email. I think the reading problem comes when children are asked to memorise words and not decode them. When strong systematic synthetic phonics is used, in whole class situations and intervention for the slow-to-start, then all the children become good at decoding. 

Here is my first email to Ms Sue Lloyd. I have now decided to post all correspondences to and from Sue and me here in this blog. Please read my earlier post before reading this. Bear in mind the following sentence from the first post;   "This teaching has now become known as synthetic phonics because the children are taught to synthesise: that is, blend the letter sounds to work out the words for themselves."

I chanced upon a lady who is a phonics proponent and we wrote a few emails to each other. She stopped the discussion midway saying that she is busy. I will share with you the gist of our emails in later posts.  Meanwhile, her website is definitely one that all teachers should visit and learn from. It is an excellent website for all academicians. I will park this article here temporarily before moving it to my main page at www.dyslexiafriend.com.  

I am temporarily parking this article here for the benefit of Stephen Krashen and his team. STEPHEN KRASHEN is professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I chanced upon the teams Face book page and requested to join the group. I shall post the discussion with Stephen and others in my blog posts at a later date but for now I am using this blog temporarily to explain to that team that the problem is not with phonics but with how letter sounds are taught all over the world.