Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?

Here’s my “why”: First of all, until perhaps very recently due to a growing outcry from parents, journalists, and other advocates, there are still schools out there not teaching any phonics systematically at all, aside from whatever teachers may have taken on themselves.

Second of all, a school may be using a phonics program or teaching phonics, but just having a program doesn’t mean doing it well.

I have witnessed elementary schools that claim to be “doing Fundations,” yet when you dig below that statement, teachers are actually using bespoke and scattered materials gathered online they feel more comfortable with, cutting out or modifying essential components (such as phonemic awareness!) or otherwise planning and delivering the program haphazardly, scheduling it at the last period of the day when kids are packing up to leave, or newer teachers haven’t been adequately—or ever—supported in using it.

In other words, phonics instruction is all too often missing that whole explicit, systematic aspect that makes it effective according to decades of research.

Furthermore – and this is the most pervasive and fundamental part that seems to be getting lost in the mix again – many of those very same schools that are “doing Fundations,” have ALSO been heavily invested in using F&P BAS and guided leveled reading, and/or the non-updated version of TCRWP Units of Study, and have been actively confusing kids who may be struggling to internalize and apply decoding and encoding skills. Such schools lean more heavily into practicing “sight words” and guessing based on context clues (i.e. “three cueing”) rather than providing direct and explicit instruction at the age and time when kids most need it. This is the “phonics patch.”

Is it hard to put numbers on this? Definitely. We barely know what curriculum is being used in most schools. But the numbers we do have across the U.S. point to a substantial number of elementary schools that fits this kind of profile.

Who loses? The students who need that explicit and systematic instruction the most. The students for whom the effort required to gain automaticity goes unrecognized and unsupported, and so they give up.

Some phonics patch schools may have overall numbers that can look pretty good from afar on outcomes-based measures, like ELA state tests. But I ask you to think about that 10, 20, or 30% of children in those schools who are NOT achieving basic proficiency. And all the other students in so many other schools who are not achieving the decoding thresholds required for deeper reading comprehension. They are for whom it matters the most.

So let’s go back to that 30 minutes a day of explicit, systematic phonics instruction. It may only be 30 minutes, but this kind of instruction requires automaticity in planning and delivery that only comes with deeper knowledge and experience. That same teacher who is delivering that 30 minutes is also teaching nearly every other subject, aside from one period, every single day. So let’s not pretend it’s easy to get this right.

Teachers need district and school leaders who provide the systems and structures needed to plan and deliver that high density instruction well.

And please, let’s also not overcorrect and feed the trolls and do phonics instruction for an hour a day. A strong, high quality ELA block should include the writing, shared reading, and read-alouds so important to gaining fluency, building language and knowledge, and peer interaction to explore multiple perspectives.

Furthermore, for students new to the English language, the critical importance of oracy and connecting decoding and encoding of words to their morphology and meaning can’t be lost. And just because an older student is new to the U.S. and learning English does not mean they need phonics instruction — and when they do, they also need all the other components of the English language.

But don’t sleep on that 30 minutes of high quality, well-delivered, direct, explicit, and systematic daily phonics instruction in the earliest grades.

I’ve also experienced this difference firsthand. My son was going to a school that fit the phonics patch profile I described above. They were supposedly “doing Fundations” alongside TCRWP, but the only evidence of instruction I could see was related to sight words and print-outs from random websites. He was not making the growth I expected, given what I knew he was capable of. I began gearing up to teach him phonics myself, but by the time I got home each day it was hard to manage.

So I pulled him out in the middle of the year and put him in another school that was also “doing Fundations,” but here’s the difference: I could immediately see the impact of it, literally after one day. As he was doing his homework after his first day in that new classroom, he was segmenting words using his fingers to figure out their spelling. He had not been doing that before. All it took was a little dose of explicit instruction, and consistent structure and routines. Now for homework, instead of random worksheets with sight words and patterned sentences for which I felt like the burden of teaching was on me, he is applying the skills he is learning in class.

Are we still also doing flashcards of “tricky words”? Of course! That’s part of the equation when learning to read in an orthography where there aren’t always direct correspondences between sounds and symbols. The difference is that the balance in practice has shifted towards gaining automaticity and accuracy with decoding and encoding, rather than putting most or all of the weight on memorizing and guessing.

My son doesn’t suffer from a language-based disability, and I am fortunate to be able to have options. But what about all the kids who aren’t so lucky? This is why I keep harping on about foundational literacy.

Let’s get that 30 minutes a day right. And let’s get that ELA block right with a high quality knowledge building curriculum. Until we do, please stop pretending that sprinkling in a little phonics into a balanced literacy mix is enough.

For more on why 30 minutes a day, see this Tim Shanahan piece: How Much Phonics Should I Teach?

#literacy #reading #sightwords #phonics #curriculum #knowledge

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.

The contrast between this information, and the printout from the Fundations program (an explicit, systematic, sequential Orton Gillingham based phonics program) was stark, and caused a strong reaction in me, as I knew that this information was inaccurate. Yet the reality is that most people—including all too many kindergarten teachers—are not aware of how this can be problematic, most especially for students who may struggle with word-level reading. So I write this post to try to clarify why this definition of sight words and the associated belief that they all must be memorized is a problem.

Locating the Source of the Problem

First of all, let me be clear that I do not blame my son’s kindergarten teacher for this misunderstanding. She has provided clarity on what the expectations are for my son’s reading based on her experience and materials that are available to her, and provides resources for us to work with my son at home in alignment to these expectations.

This misinformation about “sight words” is rather perpetuated by education publishers, self-proclaimed gurus, and consultants large and small. As one example, you can see echoes of the question “Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?” on this Scholastic page: “Sight Words 101.” Yes, that Scholastic, one of the most well known publishers of educational materials. They explain the distinction between “sight words” and “high frequency words,” and mention the Dolch high frequency word list, which “are a list of 220 words that are used so often in print that together they make up an estimated 75% of all words used in books.“

They then go on to state what is most problematic in how we talk about these words, whether we term them “sight words” or “high frequency words”:

“You might think that these words are so common that kids would just learn them organically through reading and other everyday print. But many of the words also defy standard phonetic conventions, meaning they are impossible to sound out.”

Not all the information on this Scholastic page is problematic. They helpfully explain that in fact, ALL words that a child can read with automaticity are actually sight words. They also explain that high frequency words, such as Dolch words, are often the ones most often referred to as sight words. All useful!

But you can see how most people would read something like this and say, “OK, so the words that make up to 75% of the words used in books are impossible to sound out. Therefore, these words must be memorized by sight!”

Except that it’s simply not true. Because most words in English, as “opaque” as our orthography may be, are still phonetically decodable. And that includes high frequency words on the Dolch list.

Most Words in Written English Are Phonetically Decodable

It is blatantly false information to state that most high frequency words are impossible to sound out. It is quite the other way around: most high frequency words are either entirely decodable, or at the very least, have a good portion of letter patterns that regularly match phonemes. A good example of the latter that is often used is “said.” The /s/ and the /d/ are regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, whereas the /eh/ paired to the “ai” spelling is irregular and must simply be memorized. But by anchoring that irregularity alongside the regular pairings, it still is grounded in a phonetic approach rather than blanket memorization.

So the question thus becomes: how do we teach high frequency words that follow phonetic patterns and those that are less regular more strategically, and when? And what about those words that are just completely irregular?

Rather than pretend to be an expert on this matter, I will point you to some useful resources and guides:

• [A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words](https://www.readingrockets.org/article/new-model-teaching-high-frequency-words( by Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter, and Tina Osenga
• Reconceptualizing Sight Words: Building an Early Reading Vocabulary by Amanda Rawlins and Marcia Invernezzi
• Teach “Sight Words” As You Would Other Words by Nell Duke and Heidi Mesmer
• Devin Kearns has an updated list of high frequency words based on modern word databases
• Teacher Lindsay Kemeny has a great post explaining how she approaches teaching sight words in “How should I teach sight words?”
• Pam Kastner has a great Wakelet of videos and resources to explore
• Monique Nowers has a insightful perspective from a synthetic phonics lens on her post “Sight Words”
• A video by Marie Rippel, Teaching the Dolch Sight Word List...the Easy Way!
• Also, see this study from Linnea Ehri on “Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning“

What are Sight Words, Then?

Sight words, as even that problematic page by Scholastic referenced earlier acknowledged, are not high frequency words. Sight words are rather any word that a given reader can read with accuracy and automaticity. If we are fluent readers, then most words we encounter in print are sight words, except for those rarer words we haven’t yet encountered frequently. In which case, we then leverage those strategies we have gained as skilled readers: connecting sounds to the letter sequences, or looking for meaningful parts within the word.

Once we’ve encountered the word in print a few times and made the bonds in our mind between the sounds, the spelling, and the meaning of the word, we will thereafter recognize the word at “the speed of sight,” as Mark Seidenberg puts it.

What’s the Problem, Again?

Right, OK. There remains the fact that some high frequency words are highly irregular and must simply be memorized. In fact, when we start learning the alphabet, we do learn via memorization, which is termed paired-associate learning or associative learning in the literature. So what’s the big deal? Kids still need to memorize, right?!

Yes, they do. But when the message is that MOST words in written English are not decodable and thus must be memorized, we set many kids at a great disadvantage. For students struggling to internalize the cipher of the written code, most especially for those who may have dyslexia, teaching them to use everything BUT phonetic decoding strategies robs them of one of the most reliable strategies for gaining fluency with word-level reading.

This problem then gets compounded when schools use an ELA curriculum like TCRWP Reading Units, as my son’s school does and as all too many do, which perpetuates the idea that contextual information like pictures should be used as a FIRST resort to word-level recognition, rather than as a LAST resort. So even when there may be a phonics program used by the school, it’s counteracted by all the sight word memorization and the messages given during the core ELA reading block to use all those cues instead of decoding.

So what does this result in? Too many kids who show up in upper grades who cannot recognize the majority of words in print with any level of the accuracy nor automaticity needed because they have not been taught the phonological, morphological, nor orthographic skills and patterns explicitly enough to become fluent readers.

So yes, a few initial words still need to be memorized via good old flashcard style practice. But the message to our children needs to be clear that most words are not learned this way because we can learn how to read most words by articulating the discrete sounds we can pair to letters (phonemes <–> graphemes) or, as we begin to read more complex and multisyllabic words, by recognizing the meaningful patterns and parts of words (morphemes <–> graphemes).

I invite you to share any further resources you may have encountered on this subject that are useful, or any advice you may have in supporting schools and teachers in making the shift from this approach.

#reading #sightwords #highfrequencywords #research #literacy #teaching #phonics #decoding

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