Some high-frequency words contain only standard letter-sound correspondences so are totally decodable and should not be taught as sight words. Children have been asked to memorise the word shape or salient visual features and have been ‘drilled’ with flashcards.
Typically, teachers have taught children to learn and recall these words as wholes rather than to decode or encode them phoneme by phoneme. The first 100 words from Fry’s list make up 50% of the words children read. These are actually lists of high-frequency words, the words most frequently seen in written text, therefore most likely to become ‘sight words’ first. Consequently, for many decades, teachers have been expected to teach their students a ‘sight word’ list, the most well-known being the Dolch and the Fry lists. All words, regular and irregular, become sight words for competent readers.įluent readers appear to be ‘reading by sight’, using a straight visual-lexical pathway. Words become sight words because of the number of times we see or write them in context. It is not a word that has to be learned by visual rote memory. ‘Sight word’ is a goal, not a quality of a word.”Ī sight word is essentially any word a person recognises automatically, without effort. Many irregular words are decodable except for just one letter. However, only about 4% of English words have a completely irregular spelling, such as ‘eye’. They cannot be completely encoded or decoded phonetically, even by advanced learners. These are the irregular words (sometimes called ‘rule breakers’ or ‘exception words’). These words are explicitly taught before the child reads the book. High-quality explicit synthetic phonics readers often list the temporarily tricky words they contain on the inside cover. Once the student has learned those letter-sound correspondences, the word will no longer be tricky or seem irregular.
Tricky words – high frequency but tricky to decode when a child has less of the phonics code. They will appear to be irregular to the student until the child is taught more of the advanced code. The student who has been taught only single-letter short vowel representations and the most common single-letter consonant representations will struggle to read and write some of the words commonly seen in basic sentences, such as ‘I’, ‘the’, ‘my’ and ‘was’. Tricky Words or Irregular Words?Ī word may be temporarily tricky. This blog will discuss the flaws of the ‘whole word’ approach to the learning of tricky words and suggest more appropriate teaching/learning strategies. Often, teachers try to teach tricky words using repeated visual exposure – whole word imaging or memorising – but research indicates that this is not the most effective approach. These words are tricky because they cannot be spelled or read phonetically using the letter-sound correspondences known by the student. Using letter-sound correspondences is the most reliable strategy for spelling and reading words, however, there are times when a student will come upon ‘tricky words’ and cannot rely on this strategy.