Memorization often focuses on trivial features (e.g., first letter alone, shape of the word) that may facilitate recall of a small set of words, but which do little to help organize these words into the word reading/spelling system that must develop. Linnea Ehri (2014, 2020) has best described this memory development process.īut if that is the case – and there are many good reasons to think that it is – then it makes sense to try to get words into memory through analysis rather than repetition alone (Hickey, 2007 Newman, Jared, & Haigh, 2012 Steacy, Fuchs, Gilbert, Kearns, Elleman, & Edwards, 2020 Stuart, Masterson, & Dixon, 2000). When children are learning to read, they are learning how to remember words – how to organize them in memory, how to recognize them without decoding or with minimum of decodable effort. They seem to be learning how to learn words. Students are doing more than remembering more words. Initially, learning words seems to be mainly about rote memorization, but for those boys and girls who become readers, new sight words seem to accumulate almost effortlessly. The issue isn’t whether one can learn words that way, but whether it’s efficient enough for readers to master 40,000 sight words or whether it describes how readers gain the ability to read most words.Īnyone who has carefully monitored young children’s progress in learning to read notices a magical transformation. We can, of course, memorize individual words through brute force paired associate repetition. More recent study proposes more nuanced conclusions about what it takes to “memorize” a word. Psychologists expended much effort trying to determine how many times a student had to see a word before it entered the sight vocabulary: rote repetition was imagined to be the most efficacious approach. Historically, the recognition that young readers benefit from knowing words was translated into graded word lists, flash cards, word drills, and special instructional texts with specific word repetition routines. However, that shared insight leads to very different conclusions about teaching and learning. Naïve observation, behavioral research, and brain study concur that sight vocabulary is about memory (Berglund-Barraza Tian, Basak, & Evans, 2019 Joseph, Nation, & Liversedge, 2013). ![]() Those are all good reasons for trying to teach some words, but whether those words will become sight vocabulary has more to do with how they are taught or how much time is spent on them. As you point out, they may focus on high frequency words, words that aren’t easily decoded, or words that they simply want to use in their stories. They rather hopefully label words that they designate for direct instruction as sight words, as if the instructional success were a certainty already accomplished. Reading programs may fuzz this definition up a bit. They are words that you know immediately with no hesitation. Sight words are like your best friends’ names. But I can tell you that my wife, Cyndie, would make life a bit unpleasant around here if I hesitated on her name. I’m not especially gifted when it comes to learning names. Think of a sight word as being something akin to your best friend’s name. If a student recognizes a word immediately on sight, then it is a sight word no matter how or why that word was learned. Curricula or instructional intentions play no role in the matter. When it comes to sight vocabulary definitions, I’m in the camp that reserves that label to words the students can recognize seemingly instantaneously. There certainly is research that shows sight word instruction contributes positively to fluency and comprehension (Griffin & Murtaugh, 2015), and it isn’t clear t what role words themselves play in the development of orthographic mapping - only that they may play some role (Price?Mohr, & Price, 2018 Schmalz, Marinus, & Castles, 2013). In fact, we don’t know what information is stored in the brain about words (rules?, patterns?, images of the words themselves?), so memorizing some words could be beneficial to the overall reading process. I know of no brain research that shows memorizing words to be a bad practice. ![]() 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?
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