Fluency—reading words quickly, smoothly, and with good expression—is acquired by practice, by reading words over and over again. This is consistent with what we know about neural circuits that are reinforced and strengthened by repetition. A reader must have four or more successful encounters with a new word to be able to read it fluently. Fluent describes how a skilled reader reads; automatic refers to the neural processes that are present for fluent reading to happen.
Once a word can be read fluently, the reader no longer has any need to rely on context. Fluency does not describe a stage in which a reader is able to decode all words instantly; rather, it is a process where we become fluent word by word. It is indeed a journey.
Studies in which the eye movements of readers are tracked have shown that a skilled reader pauses at between 50 and 80 percent of the words in a text. He needs to fixate on the word, essentially to scan the word in, but does so very, very quickly, because the words—their spelling patterns and pronunciations—are well known to him.
If you meet someone on the street you don’t know well, you may continue to stare at him until some shred of recognition appears; however, if you know someone well, a glance is enough.
Initially, small common words are the ones read instantly. As the reader progresses, larger and more complicated words, including words that may appear infrequently, join the words read at a glance.
Since as few as one hundred words make up half of the words in a typical book for schoolchildren, you can understand how boys and girls who are good readers can become fluent quite quickly and are soon reading books with relative ease.
It is not as fluid and easy for a dyslexic child to read with fluency.
For dyslexic readers the process of learning to read and of becoming a skilled reader is torturously slow. At the beginning, difficulties linking letters to sounds interfere with learning to read. Over time, as the dyslexic learns to read, she, too, begins to build up her neural pathways linking the way the word looks and sounds and what it means. Unfortunately, the dyslexic reader may correctly connect only a few of the letters in a word to their sounds. As a result, the neural connections for that word are imperfect and incomplete. Later on, when they come across that printed word again, it is a struggle to recognize it.
As I said, part of the process of becoming a skilled reader is creating more detailed and robust linkages representing each of the elements making up a word.
Dyslexic readers generally require many more exposures to a printed word over a much longer period of time before the neural pathways are well developed and come together each time they encounter that word. In some instances, these connections continue to be less than robust, impeding the ready retrieval of words. As a result, even when dyslexic readers are able to decode words accurately, they are still not quick in their reading of these words.
As a further consequence of their imperfect connections linking each of the elements of a word (the way the word looks, the way it sounds, and what it means), dyslexic readers often have to continue to rely on context to get to a word’s meaning. This means that the identification of the word is limited to that particular context and cannot be generalized to other situations. Because a dyslexic reader often gets to the meaning without having first fully decoded the word, the linkages between the way the word looks, the way it sounds, and what it means are not reinforced and remain imperfect.
Next time he comes across that word, it is often as if he has never seen it before, and he will have to go through the same exercise of using context to get to the word’s meaning. This is often one of the first symptom of the recognition of dyslexia.
- Excerpt from "Overcoming Dyslexia" written by Sally Shaywitz.
If you are unsure if your child is exhibiting signs dyslexia or not, I do offer an assessment that will not diagnose it, but will allow us to see a broad picture of status and the amount of risk pointing to dyslexia. Please go to the Contact page on my website to ask any questions you may have regarding the assessment. It is best to administer it BEFORE your child embarks on remediation for reading and spelling for a clear result.
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