Yesterday, I had a Zoom conversation with a wonderful lady from California who identifies as a Literacy Specialist. She expressed her confusion about the visual memorization of High-Frequency Words (HFWs). Coincidentally, this morning I came across a LinkedIn post by Nicola Lott from Canada discussing sight words and their varying interpretations. She noted, “sight word means different things to different people, creating a lot of buzz—and some confusion.”
In my book, I used the term “sight word” as it has been defined for decades. However, while proofreading two books for Dr. David Kilpatrick, I realized that sight words encompass any words we can recognize by sight.
Terms like Dolch Words, Fry Words, and Heart Words are categorized as High-Frequency Words.
Both of these women, along with many educators, struggle to differentiate between rote memory and visual memory. This confusion often stems from phonetics advocates who discourage children from learning HFWs through memorisation. This is one reason why some children struggle with reading even when phonics is taught; they often cannot decode words that are not phonetic.
Why should we ask kids to memorize words visually, similar to how one might learn Chinese characters? I teach my students to memorise through rote memory. This method is how we traditionally learned letters and numbers, memorised multiplication tables, and recalled famous quotes.
Do children who learn to read through Whole Language instruction memorize words? It seems illogical to suggest that they do not.
My first student was taught using the Peter and Jane books. I would read a sentence, and then he would read it after me. We followed this routine five days a week for six months, after which he became proficient in reading. Due to his reading skills, at the end of grade 3 he advanced from grade 3 to grade 5 and in 2021 earned two degrees from the University of Southern Australia. Notably, he did not memorize High-Frequency Words because I was unaware of them when I started teaching him in 2004.
So, how did he learn to read? He, like many children during the Whole Language era, learned through exposure. The brain is capable of deciphering reading patterns after sufficient practice.
Returning to the main point: rote memorization seems to be more effective than visual memorization for these words. I have my students list the words in an exercise book as they appear in the lessons. They memorize eight words per lesson using this method. For example, for the word “with,” they read the letter names and then articulate the word, repeating this five times before moving on.
They practice it like this: W-i-t-h, with; W-i-t-h, with; W-i-t-h, with. The next day, I ask them to spell the words they’ve memorized, and soon enough, they can read these non-phonetic words. As I teach phonics, they also learn to decode unfamiliar words using the patterns they’ve acquired.
I even taught a girl in Kenya via WhatsApp. Her mother reached out for assistance, and once the girl learned the 220 words, her essay scores improved significantly. She was 11 years old when her mother contacted me. LINK, LINK
Here are my previous posts on sight words.
Read this post to see how many teachers believe in visual memory. How have they been influenced to this extent is beyond me. LINK.
3 comments:
Thanks for this post! I am grateful to anyone and everyone who effectively teaches kids to read in English. Keep up the good work. One thing that doesn't seem to impact your ability to teach effectively but I am becoming more cautious about after reading Diane McGuinness' book "Why Our Children Can't Read" is that letter names sometimes cause "interference" with reading and writing meaning that kids confuse names and sounds and it impacts their reading and spelling. Kids will write the word "obdnc" for obedience because of this confusion. Have you encountered that with your students? I think it is wonderful that you have your pupils spell to help them them improve their recognition/automaticity with high frequency words. Nora Chahbazi teaches that students should always say the sound (not the letter name) as they write each spelling in the word. This helps them connect that each sound they are producing verbally must be represented by a spelling.
Thank you for your comment. It is comments and questions such as yours that enable me to explain further.
I have taught all my students effectively. Many students are taught by their mothers effectively by correcting the sounds of letters following my advice.
Children who learn letters are never confused. Those who are confused are kids who are taught letter sounds incorrectly.
Kids who came to me all knew the letter names and pronounced the sounds incorrectly with added vowel sounds (extraneous sounds). I corrected their letter sounds and they started learning to read.
I disagree with your statement, ‘Nora Chahbazi teaches that students should always say the sound (not the letter name) as they write each spelling in the word.’
How would one teach kids words that commence with letter names like ace, ape, age, ate, bee, beef, ceiling, deep, dear, eagle, giraffe, etc?
When you drive and want your child to read a word, say cat, on a billboard will you say, ‘can you see a word starting with the sound /c/ or would you say ‘can you see the letter c?’ The letter names are pronounced only one way whereas letter sounds are many.
C has 2 different sounds as in cat and ceiling.
Our schools here teach the letter names first followed by letter sounds.
Almost all letters in English represent more than 1 sound. So how will you ask a child in your car, when you are driving, can you see the letter A when A has 5 different sounds as:
A as in apple; A as in arm; A as in all.; A as in about; A as in ace.
Please keep your questions coming. I wish you well.
Another post that may explain a little may be found at
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/04/letter-sounds-and-letter-names.html
Post a Comment