Marion Blank is a psychologist known for her work on language, both spoken and written. The following is an extract from her article. LINK
Children with reading difficulties struggle with automaticity. Yet no attempts are made to teach them the skill because of the misguided notion that it can be developed only after extensive phonics practice. Overlearning to Automaticity (OtA) is the key to less-skilled children mastering reading. It requires multiple exposures to a word: typically, 20 to 30 exposures on each of about 200 carefully selected words from both the content and non-content domains.
About 60 percent of the words on any page are “non-content words”—words like the, so, what etc. that cannot be decoded by sounding out.
