“If practicing feels easy, you’re probably not doing it right.

Other factors in the plateau effect could be that an early lack of word meaning would mean readers could fail to capitalize on a sufficient depth and breadth of words to thus sustain growth in reading; a lack of fluency and automaticity (that is, quick and accurate recognition of words and phrases) may hamper growth beyond first learning to read; and that schooling in these upper years has less emphasis on decoding and inference and more on reading of expository tests. Also, previously “unim-portant” reading difficulties may appear for the first time in Grade 5 when children encounter informational materials and multiple text types that require more inference, comprehension, vocabulary of less frequent words, connections, and understanding (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).