This document discusses sight words and word recognition in reading. It begins by defining sight words as words that can be read automatically from memory without decoding. It then discusses different lists of common sight words, including the Dolch word list and Fry's 1000 Instant Words list. The document also covers ways to assess sight word reading and models of word recognition. It provides guidelines for teaching word identification strategies as part of reading instruction. Overall, the document provides an overview of research and best practices regarding sight words and developing word recognition skills in early readers.

4. Sight Words and
Word Recognition
Reyzen B. Dondiego
MAESL

5. SIGHT WORDS
The hallmark of skilled reading is the
ability to read individual words
accurately and quickly in isolation
as well as in text, referred to as
“context free” word reading skill
(Stanovich, 1980).

6. SIGHT WORDS
Being able to read words from memory
by sight is valuable because it allows
readers to focus their attention on
constructing the meaning of the text while
their eyes recognize individual words
automatically (Ehri, 2004).

7. SIGHT WORDS
Of particular importance in developing
early reading foundation skills is
the development of sight words
reading competencies (Meadan et
al. 2008).

8. SIGHT WORDS
Sight words are list of words that are (a) are
recognized without mediation or
phonetic analysis (Browder and Lalli) (b)
can be read from memory (c) include not
only high-frequency words but any word that
can be “read from memory” (Ehri)

9. SIGHT READING
Sight word reading is a
discreet , observable response
that is controlled by printed
stimulus (Browder and
D’Huyvetters, 1988).

10. SIGHT READING
Sight word reading is not limited to
high-frequency or irregularly spelled
words, contrary to the beliefs of some, but
includes all words that readers can read
from memory (Ehri, 2004)

11. SIGHT READING
Reading by sight is learning to recognize
words and read them quickly without
decoding (Philips and Feng, 2012).

12. SIGHT READING
Students, who can retrieve words
effortlessly by sight, will be able to read
text easily, with more meaning and are
capable of learning many more new
words (Johnston (2000).

13. SIGHT READING
Sight word reading is not a strategy for
reading words, contrary to some views.
Being strategic involves choosing
procedures to optimize outcomes, such as
figuring out unfamiliar words by decoding
(Gough, 1972) or analogizing (Goswami,
1986, 1988) or prediction (Goodman, 1970;
Tunmer & Chapman, 1998).

14. SIGHT READING
ON THE CONTRARY…..
Sight word reading happens
automatically without the
influence of intention or choice.

15. SIGHT WORDS
DOLCH 220
LIST
FRY ‘s 1000
INSTANT
WORDS

16. DOLCH 220 LIST
“LOOK-SAY
METHOD”
“GUESS”
Reading instruction should begin by teaching children to
memorize words based on their shapes (Dolch, 1941).

17. DOLCH 220 LIST
advocated teaching only sight
words in the first grade and
waiting until the second grade to
introduce phonics, if desired
(Dolch, 1941).

18. DOLCH 220 LIST
…is
1.contained of 220 words which does not
include nouns, unless a word such as walk
can be used for different parts of speech.
“Nouns cannot be of universal use because
each noun is tied to special subject matter.”
-Dolch, 1936

19. DOLCH 220 LIST
2. first called “tool words” (1936) later
became “service words” (1941)
3. readily available sorted by grade level
or frequency, although we found no
indication that Dolch himself categorized
his words by grade level or by frequency

20. DOLCH 220 LIST
“if one can read all of those
words , one can read at a
third grade level”
-Dolch, 1948
DOLCH NOUN
LIST

21. DOLCH 220 LIST
The words came from….
1. The vocabulary list from the
Child Study Committee of the
International Kindergarten Union
(1928) which listed 2,596 words
found to be known by children in
spoken language before entering
Grade 1

22. DOLCH 220 LIST
2. The first 500 words on the Gate List
(1926), which listed 1500 words of use for
teaching Grades K-2
3. A list compiled by Wheeler and Howell
(1930) with 453 words found frequently in
ten primers and 10 first readers published
between 1922 and 1929

23. DOLCH 220 LIST
193 appear in all three lists that
Dolch consulted; 27 words are in
the first 510 words in the
International Kindergarten Union
and in the first 500 words on
Gates List
(Dolch, 1936)

24. Teaching Primary Reading,
1941
1. To the beginner “knowing the
words” means sight
recognition . The child looks at
the word form, and the word
sound comes to his mind
without his knowing either how or
why

25. Teaching Primary Reading,
1941
2. If the child has a stock of fifty
(sight) words he can read
anything which is made of these
fifty words or in which the strange
words can be guessed

26. Teaching Primary Reading,
1941
3. Work with phonics used to begin with
phonetic families , but we now see that such
work was an attempt go too fast. We
now start with sight words, and to help
the child recognize or guess a word we ask
him how it begins

27. FRY’s 1000 INSTANT WORDS
Fry is widely known as on how to teach reading. On
his books “The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists
(Fry and Kress, 2006) and the “Vocabulary
Teacher’s Book of Lists (Fry, 2004) are staples in
many elementary schools.
He also developed the Fry Readability
Graph, a widely used tool for assessing the
readability of texts, novels and other
reading materials.

28. FRY’s 1000 INSTANT WORDS
He presents the words in set of five
as a “reminder to only teach few
words at a time” (Fry, 2000)
Teachers should teach phonics , but leaves
specifics as to how children and when
vague
(Fry, 1999)

29. FRY’s 1000 INSTANT WORDS
….is
1.first published a list of instant words
in 1957. He revised the list in 1980
based on a more recent frequency
count.
2.Composed of all parts of speech
3.listed by frequency

30. How to Teach Reading, 1999
2. Beginning readers need to master a
high-frequency vocabulary such
as the 600 Instant Words

31. FRY’s 1000 INSTANT WORDS
The words came from….
The American Heritage Word Frequency
Book (Carol, Davies,and Richmond,
1971) it has 87,000 words. The American
Heritage words were compiled from 1,
045 texts representing reading
requirements and recommendations in
grades 3-9 in the United States.

32. How to Teach Reading, 1999
1. Beginning readers need to master a
basic sight vocabulary of common
words, for now we will define (beginning
reader) as any child or adult whose reading
ability ranges from none to upper third
grade

33. How to Teach Reading, 1999
3. An average student in an average
school situation learns most of the first 100
words toward the end of the first year.
The second hundred words are added
during the second year. It is not until in
the third year that all 300 words are really
mastered and used as part of the students’
own reading vocabulary

34. DOLCH vs FRY
1.The Dolch 100 List and the Fry
100 list have a combined total of
130 unique words
2.70 of 130 words are on both the
Dolch 100 and the Fry 100 List

35. DOLCH vs FRY
3. All words on the Dolch 100 List
appear on the Fry 1000 Instant Words
List
4. Only 9 words on the Fry 100 list are
not on the Dolch 220 List or the Dolch
Noun List . The 9 words unique to the
Fry 100 list are each,more, number,
other, part, people, than, way and word.

36. WAYS TO ASSESS SIGHT
WORD READING
1. Testing readers’ ability to read
irregularly spelled words under the
assumption that, if these are not
known, they will be decoded
phonically, resulting in errors.

37. WAYS TO ASSESS SIGHT
WORD READING
2. Giving students a sight word learning task
in which they practice reading a set of
unfamiliar words.
Readers are taught one of two phonetically
equivalent spellings (e.g., cake vs. caik) and then
their memory for the particular form taught is
tested. Readers might be asked to recall the
spelling or to choose among alternative spellings.
Although the test is of spelling rather than reading,
the correlation between the two skills is very high,
supporting the validity of spelling as an indicator.

38. WAYS TO ASSESS SIGHT
WORD READING
3. Assessing word reading speed. This
works because readers take less time to
read words by sight than to decode them or
read them by analogy. Reading words within
one second of seeing them is taken to
indicate sight word reading.

39. SIGHT WORDS
“Speaking is a normal, genetically-
hardwired capability; reading is not. No
areas of the
brain are specialized for reading. In
fact, reading is probably the most
difficult task we ask the young brain to
undertake” (Sousa, 2005).

40. SIGHT WORDS
The appropriate response to the
graphic features of the word might not be
acquired , or blocked (Hill, 1995).

41. SIGHT WORDS
“Some children may require additional instruction
that is not tied directly to letter-sound manipulation
or phonics. In fact, for some students, the most
effective reading instructional tactic may be based
on techniques that are not exclusively dependent
on the alphabetic principle, but rather involve rote
memory of whole words coupled with context clues
in order to determine the meaning of new words.
These non-alphabetic-principle techniques, taken
together, may be thought of as sight-word
instruction” (Bender & Larkin, 2003).

42. SIGHT WORDS
Teaching sight words to beginning
readers , less efficient learning occurs
when a new word to be learned is
accompanied by related pictures
(Samuel, 1967).

43. SIGHT WORDS
Words in Isolation VS in Sentences
(context) VS with Pictures
The investigators found out that context and
picture cues slowed acquisition of new word
(Singer, Samuel, Spiroff, 1973).

44. SIGHT WORDS
HOWEVER
When most young children are immersed in
interactions with technology every day that
present multi-modal learning opportunities
(large screen tv; computer programs
available in home setting s; play with
electronic toys and games) (Bowman and
Beyer, 1994; Jewitt, 2006; Loveless and
Dore, 2002)

45. SIGHT WORDS
How children learn sight words is that
learning is enhanced when pictures are
paired with words to be learned (Goodman,
1965).

46. SIGHT WORDS
Pictures are introduced, not to supplant the
print but to provide one additional source of
information from which the beginner can
sample as he reads. Increasing the amount
of available information through the medium
of pictures is shown to have a strong
facilitative effect on word identification in
context in a smaller , though significant,
facilitative effect on world learning (Denberg,
1976-1977)

47. SIGHT WORDS
Samuel’s theory appears to be preferable as
a model for teaching non-readers of normal
ability. In comparing typical children to those
with Down Syndrome and reading
disabilities , sight vocabulary was observed
to be learned most efficiently by all
participants when the target word was
presented in isolation. (Hill,1995)

48. SIGHT WORDS
For young children identified as being
“at risk” teaching sight word recognition
may require explicit skill instruction on
the part of the education professionals
(Ehri, 2005; Lee and Vail, 2005; Stahl,
Mckena and Pagnucco, 1994)

49. WORD RECOGNITION
facilitation (faster
recognition)
or
interference (slower
recognition)

50. WORD RECOGNITION
Three processing clusters in the reading
process
1.Visual information processing (converting
print into linguistic information)
2. Cognitive processing (integrating
segmental information in text)
3.3. Metacognitive processing (relating the
textual information to prior knowledge)
(Miller, 1988)

51. WORD RECOGNITION
Model #1: Word Shape
The general idea is that we see words as a
complete patterns rather than the sum of
letter parts. James Cattell (1886) was the
first psychologist to propose this as a model
of word recognition. Some claim that the
information used to recognize a word is the
pattern of ascending, descending, and
neutral characters.

53. WORD RECOGNITION
Model #2: Serial Letter Recognition
The shortest lived model of word recognition is that
words are read letter-by-letter serially from left to
right. Gough (1972) proposed this model because
it was easy to understand, and far more testable
than the word shape model of reading. In essence,
recognizing a word in the mental lexicon was
analogous to looking up a word in a dictionary.
You start off by finding the first letter, than the
second, and so on until you recognize the word.

54. WORD RECOGNITION
Model #3: Parallel Letter Recognition
This model says that the letters within a
word are recognized simultaneously,
and the letter information is used to
recognize the words.

56. Important Elements of Phonics
and Word Recognition Instruction
1. Print Awareness—awareness of the
forms and functions of printed language.
2. Alphabetic Knowledge—knowledge of
the shapes and names of letters of the
alphabet.
3. Phonological and Phonemic
Awareness—awareness of and the
ability to manipulate the sounds of
spoken English words.

57. Important Elements of Phonics
and Word Recognition Instruction
4. The Alphabetic Principle—
understanding that there is a systematic
relationship between the sounds of spoken
English and the letters and letter patterns of
written English.
5. Decoding—understanding how to read
each letter or letter pattern in a word to
determine the word’s meaning.

58. Important Elements of Phonics
and Word Recognition Instruction
6. Irregular/High-Frequency Words—
recognition of words that appear often in
printed English, but are not readily
decodable in the early stages of reading
instruction.
7. Spelling and Writing—understanding
how to translate sound-letter relationships
and spelling patterns into written
communication.

59. Important Elements of Phonics
and Word Recognition Instruction
8. Reading Practice with Decodable Texts
—application of information about
soundletter relationships to the reading of
readily decodable texts.
9. Reading Fluency—practice in reading a
variety of texts so that reading becomes
easy, accurate, and expressive.

60. Guidelines for Addressing Word-
Identification Strategies
A beginning reading program should
include…
1. Opportunities to practice word
recognition, including words with newly
introduced sound-letter relations or word
parts mixed with previously learned words.

61. Guidelines for Addressing Word-
Identification Strategies
2. Opportunities for children to learn to use
word order (syntax) and word meaning
(semantics) to confirm the words identified
through word-recognition strategies (Adams,
1998).

62. Guidelines for Addressing Word-
Identification Strategies
3. A limited set of sight words (some of
which are regularly spelled) in the beginning
stages of reading instruction.
4. Phonetically irregular words in a
reasonable order and review the words
cumulatively.

63. Guidelines for Addressing Word-
Identification Strategies
5. Phonetically irregular words in the written
materials the students read.
6. Opportunities for children not only to
decode words but also to access the words'
meanings.

64. Guidelines for Addressing Word-
Identification Strategies
7. Strategies for
identifying words with
more than one syllable.

65. References
Ehri, L. C. (2004). Development of Sight
Word Reading: Phases and Findings
Meadan, H. Stoner, J. B. Parette, H. P. (2008).
Guidelines for Examining Phonics & Word
Recognition. Fall 2008, Vol. 5, Num. 1
Texas Education Agency. (2002). Guidelines for
Examining Phonics & Word Recognition