Help! My Literacy Lead has said we have to send lists of sight-words home for parents to teach to their children.

 

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I am but one of many academics whose work brings them in contact with schools to support a transformation away from balanced literacy (BL) to structured, explicit literacy teaching (SELT) that is informed by the evolving body of knowledge known as the science of reading. It’s pleasing to see so many teachers, schools, and in many cases, entire systems, getting on board with the need to provide reading instruction that is delivered by teachers with a deep knowledge of their language and writing system and in ways that promote success for the largest number of students as a result of Tier 1 teaching.

All good so far.

In this role, though, I am often contacted by teachers with implementation questions, as per the title of this blog-post, which was the subject-line of a recent email I received from a teacher.  These questions are a valuable lens on the change processes teachers are undertaking and the sense that they are seeing a ghost emerging out of the fog, as they gain a clearer understanding of the enormity of the differences between BL and SELT. Their questions also shine a light on what needs to be made clearer for teachers with respect to (a) the coherence of their new instructional approaches and (b) what they need to stop doing, in order to be teaching in ways that entail high levels of internal consistency and don’t confuse our youngest school learners.

Nowhere is this more evident I think, than on the question of teaching so-called “sight words”.

When I recently received the email mentioned above, I hurriedly put together a number of links and resources for the teacher who had made contact with me. This teacher also attached a letter from their principal, addressed to parents informing them of the importance of them (the parents) teaching sight words to their beginning readers, at home, through “lots and lots of repetition”.

There’s a number of fundamental flaws in this position. Let’s look at them one-by-one.

1.      It is not the job of parents to teach children how to read. I have blogged about this previously. If we accept that this is the job of parents, we have to also accept that parents are responsible for teaching measurement concepts in maths. Why stop there? We could add in hand-writing, fractions, spelling, algebra, the life-cycle of insects, the nature of tides, and while we’re at it, Newton’s theory of gravity. Come to think of it…… what’s the job of school again?

When we kid ourselves that we can out-source to parents something as essential to the early school years as teaching reading, we are simultaneously (a) displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about the complex nature of reading, and (b) de-professionalising teachers, who have gained four-year university degrees that purport to equip them with specialised knowledge about the reading process and how to teach it. Perhaps the decision to send banks of sight words home for parents to teach is an admission (albeit not spoken) that in most cases, teachers are not well prepared for classroom reading instruction, so have to rely on hope-for-the-best approaches like devolving this responsibility to parents.

Once again - it is not the job of parents to teach their children how to read. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s see if we can untangle some further knots with respect to so-called “sight-word” teaching.

2.      There is a lot of confused and confusing terminology on this topic. Confused terminology almost always means confused understanding. Hence, we see terms such as “tricky”, “irregular”, “high-frequency” and “heart” used as synonyms for “sight” words. The bottom line, as I will attempt to clarify here, is that sight words are best thought of as instructional outputs or endpoints (things children learn) – they are not (with some minor exceptions*) instructional inputs (things teachers teach). I can’t recall who first quipped that “Every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up” but I first heard this said by Associate Professor Lorraine Hammond AM, of Edith Cowan University. It is also sometimes attributed to Dr Jan Wasowicz and is a helpful mantra to keep in mind.

*When teaching using decodable texts in the early stages, it’s wise to give a boost to fluency by ensuring that students are familiar with a small number of words that form the mortar in such texts, but are sometimes not at the most phonically regular end of the continuum, e.g., my, the, I. You can read more about this on the Five From Five website.

3.      Can words in English be classified as regular Vs irregular? It seems that many teachers have been told in their pre-service education, some version of “Lots of words in English have irregular/random spellings, so children just have to learn them by rote as wholes”. Let’s put this assertion to bed:

a.      The notion of regularity is most helpfully considered as a continuum, not a dichotomy. Some words are highly regular, even for our novice learners, e.g., the words “mat” and “pit”. Some words are highly irregular, e.g., “eye” and “yacht”, and other words sit somewhere in between, e.g., “said” and “young”. The villain of the piece, in the case of relative irregularity is often a vowel or vowel team, especially in the case of words that children encounter as beginning readers (consider for example break Vs bread).

b.     When knowledge of etymology and morphology are taken into account, the notion of “irregularity and randomness” gives way to consideration of known spelling patterns and conventions. Louisa Moats has written about this here.

c.      When children are learning how to read via systematic synthetic phonics instruction, it can be helpful to apply the word “yet” to the question of whether a pattern is regular or not. The “ph” spelling for the sound /f/ is perfectly regular if you have been taught it and have had experience applying it in your reading of phonically-controlled texts, have perhaps noticed it in environmental print, and had opportunities to practise writing it. It is not something you will regard as “regular” however, if you have not yet been taught it.

4.      Learning to read is not a visual memory process. Children need to understand the code with which their writing system represents language meaning. For historical reasons, English has a complex (relatively orthographically dense) code, which takes longer for children to learn than in countries that have more transparent orthographies. Teaching children sight words (or more precisely, expecting that they somehow learn them by osmosis on their parents’ watch) is treating reading as a right-hemisphere, visual memory task. It is not allowing the language areas of the left hemisphere to do the necessary but not automatically generated heavy-lifting, to map speech and print to each other. The work of French neuroscientist Professor Stanislas Dehaene is useful for understanding this process and its importance.  

5.      Teaching sight words does not equip children with a transferable set of decoding skills that they can take to any unfamiliar word. Instead, it sends the unhelpful message that the writing system is opaque and random, and words need to be learned one-by-one, as hieroglyphic “wholes”. This is an extremely inefficient way to become a proficient reader in a language that is (a) morpho-phonemic in structure and (b) contains a larger number of words than most other languages, because of rich borrowings over a two-thousand year period. The rich borrowings have obviously also entailed a range of spelling patterns, and rather than teaching these effectively as “wingdings”, instruction can be informed by teachers’ knowledge of word families (and their spellings) from different languages. This brings order into what would otherwise be chaos.

6.      Many words on so-called “sight word” lists are easily decoded by children who have been given some basic code knowledge. So – why aren’t we just teaching the skill of decoding? Teaching banks of sight words is pretending that we have a language made up of logo-graphs (like Chinese), which we do not. As noted above, English is morpho-phonemic in structure. We encode sound through phonemes, and meaning through words (free morphemes) and affixes (bound morphemes). Author of Beneath the Surface of Words, Sue Scibetta Hegland uses the term "linguistic Lego" to describe the way English adds and removes word elements to change meaning.

 7.      Ironically, learning words by sight flies in the face of the BL argument that “context and meaning reign supreme in early reading instruction”. Nothing could be more de-contextualised in fact, than an isolated word on a flash-card. That irony seems to have been lost in BL classrooms and lecture theatres. If we want to promote students’ early fluency and reading comprehension, we need to provide them with a transferable toolkit for decoding unfamiliar words, alongside teaching them the small bank of words mentioned above, that are both more irregular and more frequently occurring, so we are removing (or at least lowering) the hurdles facing novice readers on their journey to fluency and comprehension.

8.      What we want is for initial reading instruction to result in orthographic mapping – the formation in longterm memory of permanent links between phonemes and graphemes in a word (for reading and spelling), and for these to be tied to the word’s meaning. The term orthographic mapping was introduced to the reading science field by Dr Linnea Ehri and is regarded as a theoretically robust and empirically borne-out construct with major implications for early reading instruction. You can read a detailed and thorough essay outlining her work and reasoning, and its significance for classroom teachers, in this 2022 blog-post by Stephen Parker.

Anna Geiger (The Measured Mom on social media) explains orthographic mapping in this brief video. 

      The more words we have orthographically mapped, the less mental effort we need to put into getting words off the page, and the bulk of our cognitive and linguistic resources can instead be channelled into comprehending text.

The bottom line with orthographic mapping, as noted earlier in this post, is that words become sight-words for individuals. “Sightwordedness” (my neologism for our purposes here) is not a feature of a word. It is a feature of what Charles Perfetti described as the “lexical quality” of a word – for an individual learner. High quality mental representations of a word in a child’s longterm memory (its spelling, pronunciation and meaning) promote reading comprehension, and the inverse is also true – weak representations slow down and compromise reading comprehension.

9.      Set for variability and mispronunciation correction are encouraging lines of research and practice with respect to promoting orthographic mapping (i.e. strong lexical representations of words). The term  “set for variability” seems to have been introduced by Richard Venezky in 1999, but I am happy to be corrected on that. It is related, to my mind, to David Share’s self-teaching hypothesis. The argument behind this construct is the idea that most children do not need to be taught every single grapheme-phoneme correspondence in English. Nothing succeeds like success, and once the decoding train pulls out of the station, it gathers speed, as children use (implicit) statistical reasoning to form and test hypotheses about what an unfamiliar written word might sound like when spoken aloud. The emergent reader who encounters the word “lodge” in a text and pronounces it as “lod – ge” can be praised for their effort, asked if they know such a word, and then either arrive at, or be assisted to find, alternative ways of decoding the word that lead to its correct pronunciation and meaning. 

      You can listen to a brief (five and a half minutes) overview of "set for variability" by Dr Stephanie Stollar at this Facebook link.

Importantly, as Dr Danielle Colenbrander emphasises in this recent Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast interview (in which she is in conversation with Dr Katie Pace-Miles), mispronunciation correction is completely different from the three-cuing approach that is popular in BL classrooms. Mispronunciation starts with the child’s focus on sound-letter correspondences and lifting these off the page, using the information contained in the text. It encourages narrow experimentation with different pronunciation options, not superficial attention to the word, followed by a focus on pictures and/or other so-called meaning “cues”.

Mispronunciation correction can also be harnessed alongside what Australian linguist Lyn Stone refers to as our “spelling voice” – the strategy we apply when we are spelling words that might for us, as an individual, be “tricky”. The word Wednesday is often used as an example here. If we pronounce it in our heads as “Wed – nes – day” we have more than a fighting chance of writing it correctly. Having it orthographically mapped also means that we will not persist in pronouncing it that way when we read it aloud, as we know that this is one of many words in English whose spelling and pronunciation have wandered off in different directions.

Lyn has produced a helpful brief video on orthographic mapping and how to turn words into sight-words. It also covers the folly of three-cueing as a teaching approach to support this. It is well worth 8 minutes of your time.

Turning words into sight words is a process of untangling one of the knottier aspects of contemporary reading science and is a major source of confusion for teachers and literacy leaders. Doing this with maximal efficiency (by systematically teaching code knowledge) is the most reliable path to reading proficiency and enjoyment, and ultimately to academic success, for our novice readers. 

An understanding of orthographic mapping means that the phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of words can be knitted together into longterm memory to support reading and writing, as well as strengthening spoken language. 

The role of parents in this equation is to listen to and delight in, their child's blossoming reading skills, rather than providing an after-hours rote-learning service that is poor use of everyone's time.

(C) Pamela Snow (2024)