As ubiquitous as colored pencils and alphabet posters, lists of “sight words” have long been a fixture in kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms.
These inventories identify some of the most commonly occurring words in the English language, words that children will need to recognize automatically in order to read fluently. Often, the approach to learning them is rote memorization, learning to recognize the word as a whole.
But as the science of reading movement has spread, researchers and advocates have taken aim at this method—and more generally, the idea of using “sight word” lists as an instructional tool.
Children must be able to read words like “a,” “and,” “not,” “now,” and “come,” said Kari Kurto, the national science of reading project director at the Reading League, an organization that promotes science-based reading instruction. It’s just that memorization isn’t the route to get there.
Decades of research has shown that phonics instruction—showing children how letters represent sounds and blend together to form words—is the most effective way to teach beginning readers how to identify new words on the page.
When children learn these phonics patterns, and practice reading words using them, those words get stored in their memory. “Once you practice that word enough, you are able to recognize that word as if by sight,” Kurto said—no memorization necessary.
A set of curriculum-evaluation guidelines developed by the Reading League penalize programs that teach high-frequency words as whole-word units to be memorized.
But even as more states mandate that schools adopt explicit, systematic phonics programs, sight word lists have stuck around. They’re still included in popular reading programs, including some given high marks by independent ratings organizations, and lesson-sharing websites offer up thousands of results for sight word flashcards and other drills.
In part, that’s because the English language presents some messy realities.
Many of these high-frequency words are phonetically irregular; they don’t follow normal sound-spelling patterns. Others, like the word “her,” follow regular phonics rules, but are likely to show up in early grades books before students have mastered those skills in a systematic program.
Figuring out an approach to teaching these words is essential, said Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an author of McGraw Hill’s K-5 literacy curriculum, Wonders.
“Commonly what you’ll see in programs, including programs I’m involved in, is you want kids not just to work on decoding, but also to read stories as part of beginning reading,” he said. “If you have to wait until kids can decode everything before they can read a simple story, you’re going to have to wait years, which is silly.”
Why high-frequency words should be woven into instruction
Calling the words on these lists “sight words” is a bit of an aspirational misnomer.
In research, a “sight” word is simply any word that a reader can recognize automatically, said Shanahan. The lists in question are made up of words that have a high frequency in text, with the hope that children will learn to read them on sight.
There are about 300 of these high-frequency words that make up three-quarters of the words in print in English, said Shanahan, though estimates vary slightly depending on which texts are analyzed.
Most are articles and prepositions—words like “a,” “the,” and “for,” he said. “They’re not content words. They carry meaning, but a lot of it is grammatical.”
When these high-frequency words are automatic for kids, reading becomes easier, he said, because kids can turn their brainpower to the text’s meaning. “The more cognitive resources you’ll have to think about the ideas, and deal with whatever’s hard in [the text],” he said.
Instead of a list-based approach that’s divorced from regular instruction, teaching kids to recognize these words automatically can be woven into regular instruction, Shanahan said.
For example, when teachers are introducing new sound-spelling patterns, they can make sure to include instances of high-frequency words in the practice items. The digraph th could be taught with words like “them,” “these,” and “their.”
“When kids are learning to decode, in a way they’re really learning how to remember words and how to recognize words—which is what allows them to recognize words as if it’s instantaneous,” Shanahan said.
Very early in their school career, though, students will encounter high-frequency words they can’t decode—or can’t decode in whole.
“You have to, of course, teach them some of these irregular words, because it’s hard to have any sentence that doesn’t have ‘the,’” said Kurto.
When these words are introduced, and in what sequence, could vary by classroom to classroom.
“There’s not a research-defined list of, ‘You should teach these words at this time,’ ” she said. “Of course we have the Dolch and Fry lists,” she said, referencing two commonly used lists of high-frequency words. “But it depends on what you’re having the kids read and what you’re having them practice.”
What should teachers do with irregular words?
Exactly how to teach irregular spelling patterns in high-frequency words is up for debate. Research offers some conflicting evidence.
One approach is to focus on the parts of the word that follow regular phonics rules, and build students’ understanding from there.
For example, th in the word “the” follows regular phonics rules, even though the e at the end of the word does not. In this method, students would be encouraged to sound out the beginning of the word, using their phonics knowledge, and then learn that the e violates the regular sound-spelling pattern.
This way, kids aren’t working with two different approaches to word recognition, Kurto said. “They’re still decoding.”
Teachers can explicitly address exceptions to phonics rules, said Virginia Berninger, an emeritus professor of learning sciences and human development at the University of Washington’s College of Education.
“We never let them think English is hopelessly unpredictable,” she said.
A 2022 study from researchers in Australia found that when kindergarteners were taught to attend to irregular words’ spelling and pronunciation, they could read them more accurately than kindergarteners who were taught to memorize them.
Words taught this way are often referred to as “heart” words. Students decode the parts they know, and then learn the rest by heart.
But some words don’t follow any regular patterns—like the word “of,” said Shanahan. In those cases, he said, the easiest route is to have kids memorize the word.
There’s evidence that teaching kids to memorize a small number of irregular words doesn’t interfere with their reading ability, as long as they’re also receiving systematic phonics instruction.
A 2015 paper from Laura Shapiro and Jonathan Solity, researchers in the United Kingdom, found that two curricula—one that taught phonics, and another that taught phonics and memorization of high-frequency words—were equally effective at teaching young children how to read words.
“At the very least, it’s not doing any harm to include high-frequency words,” said Shapiro, the lead author on the study, and the director of the Cognition and Neuroscience Research Group at Aston University in Birmingham, England.
Some in the education community are “anxious” that teaching any high-frequency words by sight could confuse students who are learning phonics principles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, Shapiro said.
Still, the number of words that students memorize should be “tiny,” said Shanahan. By the end of 1st grade, Shanahan said, students ought to know how to read the most commonly occurring English words, some of which are irregular. But they should know another 400-500 that they’ve learned to read through their decoding ability.
The skills that children develop to map letters to sounds should be driving their reading progress, he said—not the handful of irregular words they’ve memorized along the way.
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