Literacy Blogs

I don’t get it. We don’t teach that many sight words to young readers. Why is there so much attention to sight words? Think of any of the models of reading – the Simple View, Scarborough’s Rope, the Active View, and so on. Every one of those models highlights the importance of decoding or word recognition. Unless you can translate the marks on the page into language you can’t read. The whole point of learning to decode or to recognize words is to develop an extensive sight vocabulary. As Linnea Ehri (1995) has written: One of the great mysteries confronting literacy researchers is ...

Teacher question: Our local school district still teaches "sight words." I know that people mean various things when they call words "sight words"-- words that kids don't have the phonics principles for yet, words that are high frequency, and words that "are not decodable." I also understand that brain research says memorizing whole words is a poor practice, and I know that "sight words" is a term that is being phased out in order to communicate that 80% of words are decodable, and emphasizing helping kids flexibly solve words using the parts that do follow predictable phonics rules. Will you please weigh in?RELATED: My state is banning instructional practices… or, how to look like you are teaching effectively… Shanahan responds: I know of no ...

Teacher question: I would love to see a blog post on whether to teach sight words/high frequency words, and if there is any useful reason to track whether a student is learning them. My teachers are still teaching them in K and 1st, but more through reading and spelling them, decoding, and encoding them, in and out of text, and not by memorizing their shape. Yet, they are unsure of whether it is worth it to track which words they've learned and how much intervention to provide based on that data. Shanahan responds: The short answer to both of your questions is, “yes,” ...