Most primary schools in the UK fall into this category. Perversely, children who become reliant on sight words and contextual guessing may seem, at first, to make faster progress that even the most able decoders, especially if the school still has reading books that are designed to encourage guessing and sight word memorisation. Our brains are limited and can only store a few thousand such visual representations of words when many tens of thousands are needed to achieve a reasonable level of literacy. It might well be much easier for them to read (initially) using this alternative strategy but unfortunately it is an ineffective method. The problem is that for children who find learning phonics difficult this second ‘method’ may seem very attractive. You can’t tell which kind of a word a word is just by looking at it, so you’ll simply have to guess which strategy to use, and sometimes, just guess what the word is”īut, far worse than confusion is the real damage that this can cause by giving children the idea (whether deliberately or inadvertently) that there are not one but two ways of reading 1) decoding 2) memorising whole words as a picture or logograph. Some words are read by decoding and some are read by memorising how they look. Imagine yourself as a young learner faced with attempting to decipher text for the first time, and you are told something along the lines of: The reason they should be taught this strategy is simply because it is the correct one it is the one that represents how English works and is the one that will enable them to become the best reader they can be. It is confusing because children need to have one, just one, ‘word-attack’ strategy and that is to use their phonic knowledge to decode a word all the way through from left to right. The problem with teaching sight words as if they are a separate class of word is first of all, it leads to confusion and secondly, it is likely to have a long-term, detrimental effect on a substantial proportion of your most vulnerable readers. In other schools, the teaching of sight words is more ‘accidental’, with ‘tricky’*, or more advanced words being mis-presented as sight words (rather than harder-to-decode words) because the child hasn’t yet been taught to decode them. These are usually words from a ‘high frequency word’ list as mentioned or, much like Dolch’s idea, words extracted from the school’s reading scheme books e.g. This may be done very explicitly with, for example, words printed on flashcards presented for the child to learn. They laid the foundations for the ‘whole word” or “whole language” methods of teaching reading and a quick Google search will confirm that Dolch and other similar sight word lists are still in widespread use, particularly in the U.S.Ī more common situation in the UK today is the teaching of phonics alongside the teaching of ‘high frequency words’ as sight words, sometimes even if the sight words are easily decodable with only a basic grasp of the English ‘code’. The well-intentioned idea was to short-cut the sometimes lengthy process of learning to read, and thus quickly achieve fluency. Edward William Dolch in America, who analysed popular children’s books of the time to come up with a list of words for children to be taught to ‘read’ on sight i.e. The concept was developed in the 1930s and 40s by Dr. What is a sight word? – It is a word that can be read on sight, the implication being without the need to decode it.
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