How much do we need to advocate for teacher professional development and Pre-service training in the area of phonemic awareness? When we ask teachers and most new graduates cannot define nor teach it.

This is similar in Australia (Meehan & Hammond, 2009; Stark, Snow, Eadie & Goldfeld, 2015). You need to advocate strongly for phonemic awareness training because it strongly predicts reading achievement in school and, as you would be aware, phonemic awareness is in general a problem for children with dyslexia; an unhelpful label. I always pause when the notion of dyslexia is used – as it is not a helpful term. As Joe Elliott and Elena Grigorenko (2014) have demonstrated in their recent book The Dyslexia Debate there are no biomarkers of students ‘diagnosed’ with dyslexia and it is much better to use the phrase ‘reading difficulties’ and then diagnose the specific difficulties. I know this is not welcomed but mis-labelling is a major reason these students do not advance. There is no one or set of interventions for a generic term like dyslexia” (John Hattie, personal communication, July 13, 2017).