Sight Word

Sight words, also called high-frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight rather than sound out phonetically, so that they can be recognized instantly and read fluently. The approach rests on the idea that skilled readers recognize familiar words automatically, without decoding each letter or sound in turn, and that fixing the most frequently occurring words in a language into instant memory frees a beginning reader's attention for understanding what a text means rather than for decoding it word by word. Word lists built around this idea, most notably the Dolch word list and the Fry word list, group the words that appear most often in children's texts, including many short function words that do not follow regular phonics patterns and so are hard to sound out reliably, for repeated practice and memorization. Critics of relying heavily on sight-word memorization argue that fixing a single word in memory this way takes many repeated exposures, and that an approach built mainly around it can leave children without the phonemic decoding skills needed to sound out unfamiliar words on their own, a central point of contention in the long-running dispute between whole-language and phonics-based reading instruction.