One of the two rarest causes, fluency block shows up when a child keeps sounding out even small words, without ever moving onto to fluent reading of whole words and sentences.

What is fluency block?

Some children crack the decoding process, but get stuck sounding even simple words out without becoming fluent. Even the same word that they have just read needs to be decoded again.

The reason for this seems to be that they are building a mapping of letter patterns to sounds with the letter patterns stored in their general visual memory, not the specialist “letterbox” cortex normally used by most readers.

Have you ever raed txet liek this that smeoone has scarbmled? Amzaignly you are geenrlaly able to raed it quite flnuetly.

The reason you can read that, is that your letterbox cortex is performing an instant anagram on the letters of the word.  The letterbox is able to do it so fast with normal text that it feels as if you are identifying the words by sight. In actuality, you are doing a kind of instant decode.

Fixing fluency block

The Easyread process has taught us that two things are able to fix this blockage:

1. We ask kids to reread each phrase or sentence until it is fluent, without having to stop to decode
2. We use an anagram game to help the cortext practice finding familiar patterns

For more on this check out our book.

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