My son just entered kindergarten. We received a folder from his teacher with two sets of materials: an overview of the Fundations phonics program (good!), and a list of sight words that he would be expected to memorize each week (um).

This is how the sight word overview began:

Dear Families,

Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?

Sight word are words that do not follow the rules of spelling and therefore must be recognized by sight. The more sight words a student can recognize, the more fluent of a reader they will become.

In our last post in this series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1976 by Ken and Yetta Goodman that argued that written language is a form of oral language and thus, learned naturally in a literate society through exposure and use in the environment.

In this post, we’ll explore a direct counter to that argument made by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger in 1980.