'Sight words' - What does this mean? There is good news and bad news....

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

The IFERI committee is currently discussing the recurring issue of 'sight words' in depth - with a view to raising this topic and to providing an IFERI 'factsheet' - coming shortly.

In the meantime, however, on reading the comment below on another forum, I've decided to get started on this topic. I'm also hoping to encourage people to send their findings, such as this, or good news about changes in schools' practices for beginning reading instruction, so that we can share what is happening around the world - the 'reality' of beginning reading instruction.

My grandson is in kinder, taught by a RR-trained teacher, and nightly brings home his card of sight words to be memorised (with instruction to parents not to allow children to sound any words), as well as the usual home reader, containing words to be memorised or guessed.

This, in spite of my having spoken to the same teacher four years ago, when my granddaughter was in kinder, about the correct way to teach beginning readers. I recently had a talk to the principal and gave him a hard copy of the Five from Five report. All to no avail.

Actually, the whole message should be flagged up in red!

[Dick Schutz]

The Wikipedia entry for the term and other items in a google search define the meaning. But the EdSpeak term is the portal for all kinds of instruction, none of them good, but varying in bad. If the Committee can clean up the mess, that will be all to the good.

The post cited exemplifies one of the many "bads" and implies that "Five from Five" is a "good." Hmm. See"The New Science of Reading is Pseudo-Science." http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=1367982

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Thank you, Dick, for more interesting reading.

I've read the paper that you've linked to, and I actually suggest that it needs a new thread of its own and not just adding to a thread on 'sight words'.

Professor Diane McGuinness's work on identifying certain teaching principles, or features, in common with leading-edge research findings enabled the advent of non-researched, but evidence-informed phonics programmes to be considered for use in schools.

See Diane McGuinness's article on the 'prototype' here:

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID= ... eNumber=49

Englands' official 'core criteria' enabled the same state of affairs whereby programmes submitted for 'scrutiny' according to the government's 'core criteria' were judged to be of sufficient quality and content to be part of the 'match-funded phonics initiative' in England in 2011 - 2013.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collectio ... -programme

BUT, we can read about an apparent attempt to fudge programme content to 'fit' with official criteria in the USA here:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=2&t=568

However, I am going to re-direct the topic of this thread to 'sight-words' and what they mean to different people in different contexts!

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Molly de Lemos raised this issue specifically with the IFERI committee as it is a topic of ongoing concern - truly commonplace when you read parent and teacher forums for example.

Molly wrote:

...we continue to have children given lists of ‘sight words’ to memorise, almost as soon as they start school, and before most of them have any idea of the link between letters and sounds and what ‘reading’ (as in decoding) is all about.

No sooner had Molly raised this issue than a concerned grandparent via an education forum made the comment above on my opening posting (copied with permission).

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Dr Louisa Moats, a member of IFERI's Advisory Group, draws attention to the need for the issue of 'sight words' to be addressed fully in teacher-training commenting thus:

Our solution for this problem is first, teaching the teachers about Ehri’s phases of word reading development, coupled with the “story” of how the reading brain changes as automatic word recognition is acquired.

We also press home the point that “sight” words typically have more decodable elements than “irregular” or unpredictable elements, asking teachers to sort the most common 100 words into those that are decodable and those that have some irregularity. (The majority are decodable.)

Then, we teach them how to teach a code-focused lesson and give them a scope and sequence with the irregular words titrated in at the rate of 3-5 per week. All of these ideas are generally lacking in their preparation and licensing programs. Once they understand how sight word recognition is acquired, they can shift away from rote memorization. All this takes elbow to elbow coaching in many cases, even after the workshops.

I can confirm that programmes described as 'Systematic Synthetic Phonics programmes' that have passed the official 'core criteria' in England, drip-feed high-frequency and 'tricky' words into the content AFTER the systematic phonics teaching and content has started to be introduced and to enable the use of cumulative, decodable texts and reading books.

Further, teachers are guided that even 'tricky' words are not to be taught, or learnt, as whole global shapes but rather attention is drawn to the tricky, or unusual, or not-yet-taught grapheme (letter/s-sound correspondence) at the point the word is needed for reading text. This is a very different approach from teaching words 'by sight' by their 'shape' as a 'list of sight words'.

The problem is when teachers send home 'lists of sight words' to be learnt without attention to the phonics and without the application of 'sounding out and blending'. Sadly, even in England where the official guidance is 'not' to teach words without attention to the phonics, some teachers still send home such lists for parents to use with their children.

My understanding is that this is an even bigger problem in some English-speaking countries such as the USA and Australia.

Please contribute to this thread if this is your experience or your practice.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

John Walker writes about this topic via his 'Literacy Blogspot':

http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... sight.html

Should key words be taught as 'sight' words?

I’ve just been asked a question that comes up with unfailing regularity: what should the advice to parents be ‘if a school insists on students learning "key words" by sight and asks you as a parent to help’.

The sad truth is that if a school is sending words home that are to be learnt 'by sight', it is clear that they don’t have confidence in their own understanding of how the sounds of the language relate to the spelling/writing system and how to teach that system. Words identified by schools as 'key words' almost invariably come from the list of high frequency words listed as an appendix in Letters and Sounds. All of these words can easily be taught as part of a good quality phonics programme. This is because all words are comprised of sounds and all sounds in words have been assigned spellings, even if some of those spellings are less frequent than others. That being the case, it’s a tall order to expect any parent to know what to do with lists of 'key words' sent home for a pupil to learn to read and/or spell unless they are (a) literate, and (b) know how the alphabet code works.

John has written further postings on the topic of 'sight words' such as this:

http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... chers.html

How confused can Key Stage 1 teachers be about high frequency words?

Well, how confused can Key Stage 1 teachers be about HFWs? Answer? Very confused!

Here is a letter to parents sent home recently from a primary school somewhere in the south east of England.

Dear Parents/CarersThis week in phonics the children have been learning the following sounds:a, i, m, s, t, n, o p
They have been using the sounds to spell words. For example:at, it, an, as, sat, sit, mat, man, not, pot

There are 100 common words (key words) that occur frequently in much of the written material young children read and which they need when they write. In order to read simple captions and sentences, it is also necessary to learn to read the key words before reaching that stage in the phonics programme. The high frequency words are taught by sight from memory and we explain that we can not sound out these words. [My emphasis]

[Dick Schutz]

As soon as littlies can speak in whole sentences and participate in everyday conversation, they have acquired the necessary prerequisites to be taught how to handle the Alphabetic Code to "read text like they talk" with the same understanding they would have in spoken communication. That day will come. When it does, the endemic confusion about "sight words," "irregular words," "Phonics" and other EdTalk terms will go the way of phlogiston. Meanwhile, we deal with the world we have, not the one we will have in the future.

In the world we have, there is no way to avoid littlies memorizing words as wholes. Written words are all around them--food labels, store signs, street signs--and so on. There is no harm in this. The damage is their doing this as the default way to handle text. Some littlies will memorize entire books that are read to them repeatedly. (Some toddlers "correct" adults who depart in any way from the text--without looking at the book.) It isn't a "stage," and it doesn't matter if they believe they are "reading." They once learned that all animals aren't "doggies" and they still believe in Santa Claus; They've been used to having their beliefs changed by adults since birth. The damage comes when schools don't correct the faulty beliefs. "Sight words" are akin to "Santa Claus." The longer duration a child is taught that there are "sight words" or "tricky words," the greater the risk of "dyslexia" (another faulty reified abstraction.)

The nice thing about schooling instruction is that it doesn't have to be "spot on." Many kids (The bell shaped curve) can tolerate memorizing the silly lists of "sight words." They memorize poems, nursery rhymes, songs, and so on without any damage to their reading instruction. Sadly, it's the kids who are the most conscientious in believing and trying to do exactly what their instructors tell them who are disadvantaged by the faulty instruction.) It's the kids who learn despite the faulty instruction who make it so difficult to identify and eliminate the instructional flaws. (In medicine, it's called the "placebo effect" and there is standard methodology to deal with it. Parallel methodology exists in education, but that's a whole nother story.)

The upshot is "What you see is what you get." The closer reading instruction is Alphabetic Code-based and only Aphabetic Code-based, the greater the reliability of "teaching kids to read."

So what to do about "Sight Words?" The confusion is so endemic that efforts to "change teacher training," "train teachers" are well-intentioned but Quixotic; they are not alterable in any foreseeable time frame. The most feasible immediate antidote is England's Alphabetic Code (Phonics) Screening Check. The results indicate whether an individual needs further instruction in using the Code. However the individuals who learned how to do so by "proof of the pudding" is OK. The question is what to do with those who haven't learned. The older they are, the greater the likelihood they've been mis-instructed and the tougher it is to undo the instructional damage. Kids learn what they are taught, but they don't always learn what teachers believe they are teaching.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

I think we are at the beginning of some schools in Australia being prepared to use England's Year One Phonics Screening Check.

Interestingly, quite recently I have learnt about a school in America and a few schools in Australia where teachers from England have been shocked about the poor level, or lack of phonics teaching, in their new schools overseas.

They have taken, or in the process of taking, their experience and practice of providing systematic synthetic phonics teaching to their new schools.

They are in the process of persuading colleagues to use the Year One Phonics Screening Check and the results from England as a comparison.

Any good teacher in English-speaking countries nowadays should really know about the reading debate and be aware that they need to provide phonics teaching.

They should want to know how effectively they are teaching - and with the advent of national screening in England, they can now make a comparison.

If they're not concerned about teaching effectiveness in reading instruction, arguably they are in the wrong job.

You are right, Dick, to keep repeating that there is a lot of value in England's phonics screening check. Do you know of any infant and primary teachers in America that you can encourage to use the check?

Indeed, here is an IFERI blog posting from a teacher in a school in Australia where England's Year One Phonics Screening Check is utilised:

http://www.iferi.org/why-we-use-the-pho ... australia/

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

The topic of 'sight word learning' has cropped up again, via Twitter, with people concerned when pro-phonics academics also allot considerable emphasis to the notion of 'sight word' learning - by drawing attention to a handful of printed words that are particularly 'strange' with regard to their spelling.

One way of looking at this is numerically - the fact that there are few words which are truly weird in their spelling compared to thousands and thousands which are not when a comprehensive range of letter/s-sound correspondences has been taught well as an essential component of reading instruction.

Ideally, systematic synthetic phonics programmes should drip-feed words with some more unusual spellings (and which are high-frequency and useful for reading texts) and the teacher can draw attention to them - pointing out the parts of the word which are straightforward, and the part or parts of the word which are 'tricky' or 'unusual' - or it could simply be the case that the 'alphabetic code' (the letter/s-sound correspondence) has not yet been taught for the word.

This drip-feeding process, however, occurs AFTER the outset of systematic synthetic phonics instruction so that learners are already well on their way to routinely looking for the code within printed words and applying their synthesising skill (sounding out and blending).

The aim is for the learners to be automatic decoders of all-through-the-word phonics application before introducing the occasional word which has more unusual code, or has not yet been taught but is useful for reading texts.

In contrast, the notion of 'sight words' which amount to lists of words provided as whole words without any analysis of the phonics code within them, are commonly provided for young learners to be 'learnt' off-by-heart through shape recognition.

If such a list is provided before a good phonics introduction, or in parallel with a phonics introduction but as a dominating component of provision and practice, then this detracts from the phonics application, gives the learners a contradictory message as to how 'reading' works, and can be very damaging and challenging for many children to cope with.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Mike Lloyd-Jones has written a very good blog posting about 'sight words' via his 'Phonics Blog':

Common Exception Words and the Muddle over Tricky Words

http://www.phonicsblog.co.uk/#/blog/456 ... ds/7631625

Misconceptions about so-called tricky words abound. For example the website of a Swindon primary school tells us: “Tricky words are words that cant (sic) be sounded out such as: the, to, no and go.” A Bristol primary school informs its parents: “Decodable words can be 'sounded out'. Tricky words need to be learnt by sight.” A South Gloucestershire primary says: “There are some words in the English language which you can't sound out (at school and in homework these are often know (sic) as the 'Tricky words'). For these words your child needs to use a variety of other skills, starting with 'sight reading' (learning to recognise the word as a whole instead of trying to break it down into its individual sounds).”

The widespread confusion amongst teachers about tricky words is actually a symptom of something else - a widespread lack of understanding of how the sound-spelling system works in English, including its complexities, and recognition of how a good phonics programme handles that complexity. The emphasis on phonics in the revised National Curriculum is greatly to be welcomed. It is the first time that the National Curriculum has so explicitly and definitively established phonics as the required approach to teaching reading. But its successful implementation will depend on teachers having the secure professional knowledge to understand the alphabetic code and how it works.

The whole post is well worth reading if you have an interest in this topic.