The Whats, Hows, and Whys of Teaching Sight Vocabulary

I don’t get it. We don’t teach that many sight words to young readers. Why is there so much attention to sight words?

Think of any of the models of reading – the Simple View, Scarborough’s Rope, the Active View, and so on. Every one of those models highlights the importance of decoding or word recognition. Unless you can translate the marks on the page into language you can’t read.

The whole point of learning to decode or to recognize words is to develop an extensive sight vocabulary. As Linnea Ehri (1995) has written:

One of the great mysteries confronting literacy researchers is how mature readers are able to read written materials so rapidly and fluently yet with full comprehension (Adams, 1990; Barron, 1986; Chall, 1983; Perfetti, 1985; Rayner and' Pollatsek, 1989). A capability that has proven central in explaining this feat is the ability to read single words rapidly and automatically by sight (LaBerge and Samuels, 1974). Readers are able to look at a word and immediately recognize its meaning without expending any effort decoding the word. [italics added]

Word recognition comprises phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, decoding skills, phonics knowledge, and recognition of familiar words at sight. The major reason for gaining that collection of skills is to enable readers to do what Ehri describes – to read texts rapidly and fluently and to recognize large numbers of words immediately and without any obvious mediation (e.g., sounding out words, breaking words up by syllables, relying on context). Readers must get to the point at which they can recognize entire words as quickly as single letters (Ehri, 1992; Morris, et al., 2018).

Maybe I’m not understanding what a sight word is?

A sight word is any word that a reader can recognize immediately and without obvious mediation. I’ve long thought of it as being like your “best friend’s name.” You know, a word that you would never hesitate on. (I know if I were to hesitate on Cyndie’s name, I’d have serious problems!)

For most children, their first sight word is their own name.

Some authorities operationally define sight words based on time (Aaron, et al., 1999; Anderson & Scanlon, 2020). They present an isolated word (that is without other words or pictures), and if a reader can identify it in 2 seconds or less, it’s a sight word.

The key features are immediacy, ease of recognition, and as if being pulled back from memory rather than being sounded out or analyzed (and as if in the context means that it seems that way even if that is not the truth).

But I thought the words on the Dolch list were sight words?  

In 1936, Edward Dolch, a professor of reading at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, published a list of words that he thought would be useful for teaching reading. By design it focused on “function words;” high frequency pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives – words that tend to express grammatical relationships. No nouns need apply.

He started with three existing word lists – one of which provided the frequencies of words in beginning reading textbooks of the 1920s. His methods for selecting words from these lists were a bit shaky, too – he didn’t always follow his own selection rules (Johns, et al., 1977), adding or omitting words without explanation. Nevertheless, even as late as the 1970s, 55% of the Dolch words were showing up in textbooks with great frequency.

Dolch’s notion was that there were words so common in English that students should learn them as sight words. He wasn’t claiming these were sight words. He was proposing them as candidates for this role in a reading curriculum. Essentially he was saying, “teach the words on this list to the point that they are sight words for all children.”

It doesn’t sound like you think teaching the Dolch list is such a good idea. Am I right?

I can give you a definite “yes” and “no” on that. I agree with Dolch’s reasoning. It makes sense early on to ensure that children can easily recognize the highest frequency words in the language. Being able to recognize such words on sight, should provide a marked boost to children’s early reading success.

While many words on Dolch’s list may no longer be the most frequent words, almost all of them are still used a lot. The distinction isn’t between good and bad but between highly frequent and a bit less frequent. Drop the word “shall” and the list isn’t terrible.

Nevertheless, there are more recent lists than Dolch’s. It surprises me a bit that we’re still focused on preparing kids to read the 1920s textbooks. In the age of computers, the internet, and AI, we might want to update our game a bit.

What other lists are you talking about? 

The Fry Instant Word List is one. Edward Fry put this together from a corpus of 5 million words drawn from the textbooks of the 1960s and 1970s. It provides the 300 most common words from that source – and the Fry and Dolch lists only share 70 words. I’ve long told teachers that they should make sure kids can recognize on sight the first 100 of Fry’s words by the end of grade 1, and the whole list by the end of grade 2. Those are arbitrary goals, but reachable and useful.

The 100 most frequent words constitute approximately 50% of the words that kids will see in any text and the 300 increases this to about 75%. Knowing such large proportions of the words in texts should greatly reduce the cognitive load of reading, allowing for greater fluency and better comprehension.

I’m getting confused about the differences between sight words, high frequency words, and words with irregular spelling patterns?

Remember that sight words are any words that readers can recognize immediately. It doesn’t matter how those words are learned or where they come from. The only way to determine if a word is known by sight is to check to see how quickly students can read it in isolation. That means that different students are likely to possess different sight words.

High frequency words are words that show up in text, well, with high frequency. We determine frequency by tabulating the number of times that they show up in text. Frequency counts have nothing to do with readers. They are figured out by looking at texts not kids and the point is to identify words that would be worth mastering early on.

Words with irregular spellings (e.g., the, of, where) are also identified by looking at texts rather than students. For example, there are many words in English that have a CVCe spelling pattern (consonant-long vowel-consonant-silent e): cane, dine, here, mope, cute. Teaching this pattern in phonics can allow students to decode many English words. However, there are exceptions to this pattern (e.g., there, where, done). It is those exceptions that we are talking about when we refer to irregular spelling patterns. Often these words are suggested as good candidates for sight word instruction – as it is assumed (incorrectly) that phonics could play no role in the learning of these words.  

So sight words are the words that kids can recognize immediately, and high frequency words and words with irregular spelling patterns are often recommended to be taught.

Does that mean that sight words are learned through memorization and other words through decoding?

Nope, a word’s status as a sight word has nothing to do with how it was learned (Miles & Ehri, 2019). Kids can acquire words through memorization with lots of repetition or through partial or full decoding.

Nevertheless, our methods for teaching should encourage students to recognize and understand the ortho-phonetic structure of the words. Initially, kids are likely to rely on any cue they can find (e.g., a bend in the corner of flash card, a fingerprint, the first letter) to help them to remember the words (Ehri & Saltmarsh, 1995; Gough, 1993), but this changes as they start to master the spelling system.

Is it better to learn sight words one way or the other?

I prefer to think of sight vocabulary instruction as being less about memorizing a list of words, and more about learning how to recognize and remember words (Ehri, 1995; Ehri, 2009; Ehri, 2020; Wright & Ehri, 2007).

Research shows that as students get better with decoding, remembering sight words becomes less burdensome (Levy & Lysynchuk, 1997). It requires less memorization. The students are clearly learning more than a collection of words. Either through their own pattern recognition abilities or with the support of decoding instruction, students start to recognize and remember these patterns more proficiently.  

Accordingly, many experts recommend introducing words through analysis (Rawlins & Invernizzi, 2018), and I agree with that. What makes words distinctive is their combination or sequence of letters and the relationship of these letters with the language sounds (the phonemes). Instead of just showing the word and saying its name and then having the children repeat the name, we should draw attention to the spelling and sounds.

Here is an example. In this case, the children have already learned the d sound, but not the sound of the short i. This kind of partial knowledge is common in Grades K and 1, depending on the specific words, the time of year, and the curriculum the students are being taught. If the students knew the i sound, then we’d work on sounding that letter, too.

[Show the word.]

“This is the word did, D-I-D” [pointing to the letters one at a time].

“I’m going to use the word did in a sentence.  You did a great job.”

Look at the word did.

Say “did.”

“What letter does did begin with?”

“What sound does the letter d make?”

“What sound do you hear at the beginning of did. Did” [emphasize the beginning sound].

“What sound do you hear at the end of did. Did” [emphasize the ending sound]. 

“Look at the word did. Take a picture with your eyes. Now close your eyes. Can you see the word did with your mind? Can you see its letters? Can you spell did with your eyes closed? If you can’t, open your eyes and look at the word again. Say its letters one after the other. Make the letter sounds to say the word.”

What about those irregularly spelled words?

Even those words can benefit from an analytical introduction. Most of these words are not entirely irregular. That is there tends to be only one odd or discrepant spelling. For instance, the e in the is peculiar but the th is standard. 

One of my favorite oddballs is the word of. That, to me, is fascinating because it is the only word in English in which the f represents the /v/ sound. With a word like that, I would explain that it’s a one-off and show them how odd it is by comparing it to some other words like if or fan. That’s not a word with a generalizable pattern, so it should be especially obvious have valuable memorization would be. Nevertheless, I would guide the students’ analysis of the consistencies and inconsistencies in such and then we would turn to making sure that word ended up in memory (Murray, et al., 2018).

Are you saying that there is no place for memorization?

That’s too strong. Memorization plays an important role in the development of sight vocabulary (Baraneck, et al., 2011; Wordsdell, 2005). Introducing new words through analysis as in the example above can help students to develop a mindset of looking for spelling and pronunciation patterns. But that, especially early on, is unlikely to be sufficient to transform those words into sight words.

That’s why some experts champion the idea of having students then drill these words with flashcards, word ladders, racetracks, or games (Barwasser, et al., 2022; Eichstaedt, 2023; Kupzyk, et al., 2011; Sullivan, et al., 2013; Volpe, et al., 2011), and pretty much everyone encourages lots of exposure to those word in text (e.g., controlled vocabulary readers, decodable texts, language experience stories).

Teaching should ensure that kids end up with large numbers of words in their sight vocabularies, and that will require some memorization. It’s a good idea to offer helpful guidance about how to look at, think about, and remember these words along the way, and then to turn to repetition and memorization strategies to ensure they are known automatically.

At our phonics workshop, we were told that memorizing words will undermine our students’ decoding abilities. Is that true?

There is absolutely no credible evidence that memorizing words interferes with or interrupts decoding development – and there is much evidence to suggest that to be unlikely. Some studies even show that some students can develop appropriate decoding skills from word memorization alone (Barr, 1974-1975; Biemiller, 1974; MacArthur, et al., 2015; MacKay, et al., 2022). That makes sense because our spelling system is a system. It is, admittedly a complex system, but it is systematic, nevertheless. (This is not an argument against phonics: research is clear that kids make faster progress when phonics is included in reading instruction).

How much time should be spent on decoding instruction and how much on sight vocabulary?

That isn’t easy to divide up, since the purpose of decoding instruction is to increase sight vocabulary. Let’s distinguish between decoding instruction and efforts to directly memorize individual words. I’d suggest 25-30 minute per day on decoding and perhaps no more than 4-5 minutes on trying to stick words in memory.

Do you have any other advice for analytically teaching words to the point that they are sight words?

One recommendation is to teach students to do more than recognize these words. They should learn to write and spell them, too (Leal, 2005; Perry, 1987). Add that step to the kind of lesson described above and check students’ ability to spell those words from time to time. Techniques like “copy-cover-compare,” in which students try to write the words from memory can be quite effective (Conley, et al., 2004).

Another idea is to teach students how to expand their sight vocabularies by showing them how to add inflectional endings (e.g., ing, ed, s) and such (Floriani, 1979). Through that kind of exercise, a word like use multiplies by generating uses, using, and used. As progress is made, other morphemes can be used in the same way. A word like wash can become washed, washing, washes, but also unwashed, prewashed, rewashed, and washable. This kind of work will increase the numbers of sight words and can simultaneously expand word meaning knowledge and increase understanding of how words work. [Note: Those word frequency estimates provided above were based not on those individual words alone, but on those words along with the inflected forms of those words. That is true of both the Dolch and Fry lists.]

Other experts do similar work focused on word families or rimes (Johnston, 1999; Sanacore, 2010; Stuart, et al., 1999). Students might know the word cold and from this they can expand their vocabularies by transforming it into old, bold, fold, gold, hold, mold, sold, and told. Again, this provides a great opportunity for helping kids to understand how words work – just think about how you will respond when kids try to add kold or rold. One successful possibility is to engage kids in word sorts with their sight words – organizing words by different spelling patterns, morphemes, or phoneme-grapheme relations. In this case, the students would work on becoming adept with that old pattern, separating those old words from “sound alikes that are spelled differently” like bowled and rolled (Bear, et al., 2011).

Do you have any advice for memorization?

Memorization of words is an issue of drill and practice. You want memorization sessions to be brief, spirited, and fun. It’s popular to insult or belittle flash cards, but research shows they can work (Nicholson, 1998). I’m a believer in using time trials in memory exercises. Have the kids try to read 10 words in 10 seconds; speed matters (Griffin & Murtagh, 2015). If they miss, shuffle the cards and try again. Other folks recommend having kids work their way around a racetrack of words or climbing word ladders, and those can work, too.

Drill and practice is best in short doses, that’s why interval training is better than massed training for this kind of thing. You would be better off having kids practice in intervals, spending 1-2 minutes a couple times a day on this kind of rehearsal.

No matter how you organize this kind of repetitive practice, research say kids make greater progress when they work with words that are a mix of items that are already known along with items they are still uncertain about (Peterson-Brown & et al., 2019; Phipps, 2022).

Another bit of advice: DON’T have students doing memorization work with words that are highly similar (e.g., where-were). Teach one of those words well before introducing the other, and when you do introduce the second, be sure to explain the differences (Chotto, 2021).

Moms and dads can help with this kind of work, too. I’ve long recommended that they watch a 30-minute television program with their kids, muting the set during the commercials for word practice. That provides 6-minutes of interval practice – and can reduce the need for this kind of effort in the classroom!

When I’m teaching words, should I use pictures?

There is nothing wrong with introducing a word with a picture if it helps kids to learn a word meaning. However, studies suggest that pictures serve as a distraction when it comes to learning to read the words (Fossett & Mirenda, 2006; Meadan, et al., 2008; Richardson, et al., 2017). We want the kids to look at the words, not the pictures. Feel free to start with a picture but put it away quickly and focus children’s attention on the printed word!

Any final thoughts about sight words?

Yes. Remember that it isn’t enough that kids memorize isolated words. Make sure there is an initial emphasis on analysis and that a good deal of the later repetition takes place in text (Alberto, et al., 2013; Ehri, et al., 2007; Hood, 1974; Torgensen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997). Getting kids to respond to isolated words deserves a place in instruction, but it’s a small place (Ceprano, 1981). It is even more important that kids see these words in text. 

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