The Whats, Hows, and Whys of Teaching Sight Vocabulary

Tim Shanahan

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?  

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