‘The attitudes of some teachers who continue to battle against any change, desiring full autonomy to choose the assessment and instruction with which they are comfortable, is beyond aggravating.’ (Kylie Hoey)
The above coming from Kylie Hoey is ironic.
I remember a discussion in April this year, where she insisted that High Frequency Words should not be rote-memorised. I have taught over 80 dyslexic children who learn to rote-memorise the Dolch words with ease. LINK LINK
She reminds me of the Tamil fable of the prince who caught a three legged rabbit and declared that all rabbits are three legged.
Like most teachers she probably does not know what rote memorisation is. I’ll explain it again. This is what I teach in my book, 'Teach Your Child to Read'. It comes with a QR Code that a kid can listen to while reading the lessons. It needs no parental guidance.
LINK . Those in India and Malaysia may get it at LINK
I teach phonics and 220 high-frequency words. That is not look-say.
People hear “high-frequency words” and “rote” and decide they already know the lesson. They picture a child staring at a flashcard, matching a silhouette to a spoken word, and guessing from the first letter when the card is gone. That is not what I teach.
I teach phonics. I teach letter sounds. I teach word families. I also teach a closed set of about 220 high-frequency words so they stop interrupting every sentence. Those two things are not opposites.
Here is the high-frequency lesson. For with, the child says the letters, says the word, and does that a few times:
w-i-t-h, with.
w-i-t-h, with.
w-i-t-h, with.
Then we move on.
The child is looking at letters, in order, and attaching the spoken word to that string. The same child will meet with again in the book we read that day. That is the whole method: letter sequence, pronunciation, a short burst of rehearsal, and ordinary print. I do not teach word shapes. I do not teach children to use the picture. I do not tell them this word is exempt from letters.
In research, a “sight word” is any word a reader recognises at once. That is an outcome, not a method. Every skilled reader ends up with thousands of such words. The argument is only about how they get there. Saying the letters and saying the word is one way of binding the spelling to the pronunciation. Meeting the word again in connected text is what makes the binding hold. My students do not struggle to hold a list of this size, because the words are not rare museum pieces. They are the words that turn up all day.
Phonics is for the words they have not stored yet. Word families multiply that skill. The high-frequency set is for the workhorses — the, said, was, of, you, with — so decoding effort is spent on unfamiliar print, not on the same twenty words in every paragraph. When those words are automatic, the child has attention left for the next new word. That is the point of the list. It is not a substitute for the code.
If your objection is to whole-word guessing, we are on the same side. That lesson has no place here. If your objection is that children should never rehearse a common spelling, we disagree. English is an alphabetic language. These 220 items reuse the same letters. Children are not being asked to store 220 unrelated drawings. They are being asked to know, cold, a short list of spellings they will see every time they open a book.
I teach children with dyslexia. They need the code. They also need the sentence to stop collapsing on was. Letters, word, repeat, read it in a book. That is the message. Everything else is a fight with a lesson I do not give.
Note: I asked Kylie Hoey if she understood what I meant by ‘rote memorisation’. She blocked me. First block on Substack.
She also removed her own line that Substack is turning into Facebook. I read the long post, had to subscribe before I could comment, and then what I wrote was blocked/deleted.
Is it any wonder literacy rates have barely moved?
A question about how children actually learn to read should be able to stay visible. If it has to be gated, then erased, we are not having a discussion. We are managing a feed.
Why can’t a question be left up so others can read it and reply?
Updated at 3.30am 29.9.2026, Malaysian time.
The following is what I read in my in-box.
'Is that your serious reply to me? No, I do not wish to discuss anything with you when you are so rude.
You’ve had this discussion with me, even though I cannot remember, so I think you already know my views on this.' I asked her if she knew what rote memory is. I was blocked for asking that question. |
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