Many remedial students have developed guessing habits from too many sight words. Also, Don Potter has an excellent sight word web page explaining the harm that sight words can do. More videos are in aYouTube sight word playlist. To learn more about sight words, you can watch the sight word movie in QuickTime format or in YouTube format. įor further explanation of how sight words can encourage the symptoms of dyslexia and an explanation of the nature of sound and how our brains learn to process the sounds in words, see the dyslexia page. Sounding every word out from left to right helps encourage proper left to right eye movement while reading. Too many words taught as wholes by sight encourages the symptoms of dyslexia. Recent brain research has found that the adult brain of good readers does not process words as wholes, but instead, as Stanislas Dehaene explains in his article, The Massive Impact of Literacy on the Brain, by analyzing the individual letters and letter teams at the same time in a "massively parallel architecture." The speed of this parallel processing led early researchers to believe that the brain was processing the words as a whole, but recent brain research using more powerful technology has found the opposite. For a good explanation of the nature and history of these sight words lists, see Comparing the Dolch and Fry High Frequency Word Lists by Readsters. They should merely be taught phonetically along with other words.īoth the Fry and Dolch sight word lists are based on whole word methods and are high frequency words. Sight words should not be taught at all in a pure phonics program that teaches by sound. Of these 12 Fry sight words, 9 are completely phonetic and the other 3 have simple exceptions. The Fry 100 sight words or "instant words" are also commonly taught, and all but 12 of them are contained on the Dolch list. For the other 70 words, 68 conform to simple patterns of exceptions and can be taught phonetically. Of the 220 most commonly taught Dolch sight words, 150 are completely phonetic and can be easily learned by sound. However, many of the newer phonics programs also use an alarming number of sight words. This can cause problems for many students. Whole word methods teach every word as a sight word, one word at a time, without teaching students the sounds in these words.
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