![]() (2015) found that students who received phonics instruction combined with sight word training made equivalent gains to students who received phonics instruction only. Some phonics advocates believe that teaching children even a small number of words as unanalysed wholes may lead to confusion about letter-sound mappings and instil bad reading habits, but research evidence does not support this idea. Multiple research studies have demonstrated that this is what readers do when they encounter a new phonetically ‘irregular’ word ( Ehri, 2005 Frost, 1998 Katz & Frost, 2001 Share, 1995 Van Orden & Kloos, 2005). This is called ‘set for variability’ or ‘mispronunciation correction’. ![]() A partial decoding is often enough to get the reader close to the correct pronunciation so they can retrieve it from their spoken vocabulary. This singular irregularity is then remembered for future encounters. The ability to notice and utilise the stable letter-sound correspondences in these words help us to create a “phonological framework”, and we then note the irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence in the word. Consider the words ‘of’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘above’ and how they can be ‘mapped’ utilising knowledge of more regular letter-sound correspondences. What about words that do not follow the usual phonic patterns? Most ‘irregular’ words usually only have one grapheme-phoneme correspondence that does not follow the usual rules. On this page, the term sight word refers to any word that the reader can instantly read in this way. Words that are recognised immediately have been orthographically mapped and stored in long-term memory for effortless and rapid retrieval ( Ehri 2013). This definition can apply to any word that is recognised immediately as if by ‘sight’, regardless of whether the word is phonetically regular or irregular. It is thought that learning high frequency words ‘by sight’ early in the development of reading will accelerate children’s ability to read independently. High frequency words are lists of words that occur most frequently in English written texts and are often taught as unanalysed whole words, even when they are phonetically regular, such as ‘them’. We will refer to them on this page as phonetically irregular words for simplicity, while noting many are decodable once children learn the full phonic code. These are words such as ‘one, ‘was’ or ‘yacht’ and they are usually taught as if they can only be learned as an unanalysed wholes, as word pictures, or as if by ‘sight’. Phonetically irregular (or less regular) words are often referred to as ‘sight words’ because they are difficult for beginning readers to decode using limited phonic knowledge. What are sight words and do they have a place in early reading instruction? The term ‘sight word’ can be confusing because it is used in numerous ways in the context of teaching reading.
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