When you read you often see familiar words and you recall them from memory. Consider this ….

‘The message is, “You’ve seen that word a few times now. You should have memorised it. Memorising whole words is what you’re supposed to be doing. That’s what reading is. And before too long the child begins, consciously or unconsciously, to attempt to memorize whole words. (McGuinness C & McGuinness G. 1998)

That would be alright if it worked, but it doesn’t. The typical person can memorize only about 2,000 to 3,000 words. That’s enough to perform at a first-grade level …. Allowing a child to memorize words without teaching him the code actually creates a deficit for him. (McGuinness C & McGuinness G. 1998)

If a typical person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and visual memory can only account for about 2,000 to 3,000 of those 20,000 words, then how do we read the other 17,000 words?

This is because what people who read well understand, consciously or unconsciously, is that the Alphabet is in fact a code, and that reading properly means being able to decipher that code.

Reading properly therefore really means being able to decode.

McGuiness, C & McGuiness, G (1998) Reading Reflex. Fireside