That Popper’s falsification is applied to the hypothesis that SSP is the most effective instructional model and placed under rigorous scrutiny is important.Scrutiny that whole language,balanced literacy theorists avoid. The point is to try to disprove your theory not to prove it.
Holdaway 1979,Teale 1984, Stanovich 1989 all conclude that English reading instruction should start by the age of 6. Wilson (1938) research discredited Dewey’s obsession with delay. Terman and Walcott (1958) suggested that the doctrine of delay was the result of poor teaching.
English is the most complex alphabetical language with the the most opaque orthography (Goswami, 2005) and takes at least a year longer to learn to decode than other complex languages (Dehaene, 2015) and years longer than languages with transparent orthographies like Finnish.
It is not merely the decoding of English that takes longer to master it is also automaticity - 5 presentations as opposed to 2 in more transparent languages (Share, 2004) for the word superiority effect(Reicher, 1969) to become manifest.All this before reading fluency is possible
We must beware the resurrection of the discredited concept of reading readiness and delay with its implied and convenient excuse that children who can’t read are just not ready rather than poorly taught.
