Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode. The term sight words is often confused with sight vocabulary, which is defined as each person's own vocabulary that the person recognizes from memory without the need to decode for understanding. Sight words were introduced after Whole languagefell out of favor with the education establishment.
Rationale
Sight words account for a large percentage of the words used in beginning children's print materials. The advantage for children being able to recognize sight words automatically is that a beginning reader will be able to identify the majority of words in a beginning text before they even attempt to read it; therefore, allowing the child to concentrate on meaning and comprehension as they read without having to stop and decode every single word. Advocates of whole-word instruction believe that being able to recognize a large number of sight words gives students a better start to learning to read. Recognizing sight words automatically is said to be advantageous for beginning readers because many of these words have unusual spelling patterns, cannot be sounded out using basic phonics knowledge and cannot be represented using pictures. For example, the word "was" does not follow a usual spelling pattern, as the middle letter "a" makes an sound and the final letter "s" makes a sound, nor can the word be associated with a picture clue since it denotes an abstract state. Another example, is the word “said”,it breaks the phonetic rule of ai normally makes the long a sound, ay. In this word it makes the short esound of eh. The word "said" is pronounced as /s/ /e/ /d/. The word “has” also breaks the phonetic rule of s normally making the sss sound, in this word the s makes the z sound, /z/." The word is then pronounced /h/ /a/ /z/.
Word lists
A number of sight word lists have been compiled and published; among the most popular are the Dolch sight words and the Magic 100 words. These lists have similar attributes, as they all aim to divide words into levels which are prioritized and introduced to children according to frequency of appearance in beginning readers' texts. Although many of the lists have overlapping content, the order of frequency of sight words varies and can be disputed, as they depend on contexts such as geographical location, empirical data, samples used, and year of publication. Research
Criticism
Research shows that the use of sight words does not sufficiently develop phonological awareness. The use of sight words as a reading instructional strategy is not consistent with the dual route theory as it involves out-of-context memorization rather than the development of phonological skills. Instead, it is suggested that children first learn to identify individual letter-sound correspondences before blending and segmenting letter combinations. Exponents of synthetic phonics argue that children must first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters, then the blends of those sounds, and that children should never memorize words as visual designs. Using sight words as a method of teaching reading in English is seen as being at odds with the alphabetic principle and as introducing English as though it was a logographic language.
