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.