Teacher question:

I would love to see a blog post on whether to teach sight words/high frequency words, and if there is any useful reason to track whether a student is learning them. My teachers are still teaching them in K and 1st, but more through reading and spelling them, decoding, and encoding them, in and out of text, and not by memorizing their shape. Yet, they are unsure of whether it is worth it to track which words they've learned and how much intervention to provide based on that data.

Shanahan response:

When I was a first-grade teacher I noticed that early in the year my students had trouble remembering new words. We’d review and review, and the next day, the kids often didn’t remember them. Later in the year, I’d introduce new words and that was all it took for many of my students. They seemed to remember those without any effort. What a change!

That means my students weren’t only learning words; they were learning how to learn words. Later, researchers (e.g., Ehri, 1998; Ehri, 2014; Share, 2004) provided more systematic proof of what I’d witnessed and more elaborate theoretical explanations (e.g., orthographic mapping, self-teaching). Basically, phonics instruction – along with phonemic awareness and morphology – helps students to form an internal cognitive memory system that allows them to efficiently remember words.

Most important, there is considerable evidence showing that students can generalize from memorized words to the decoding of not-yet-known words (Barr, 1972; Brunsdon, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2005; Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson, 2000; Kohnen, Nickels, & Coltheart, 2010; Kohnen, Levlin & von Mentser, 2020; Nickels, Coltheart, & Brunsdon, 2008; Thompson, Fletcher-Flinn, & Cottrell, 1999). As such, it might be best to think of this teaching as part of the phonics curriculum. No one knows exactly what gets stored in memory -- abstract patterns, rules, or even words themselves -- but including words in what we teach seems to help a bit.

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