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November 2009 Newsletter |
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| In dysfunctional look-and-guess, "whole language," anti-phonics "Reading," sight words are words students memorize and supposedly "read" without knowing all their letter-sound correspondences. This wrongly reverses Bloom's taxonomy, which says students should master simple skills before attempting more complex tasks. And it voids this rule's pro-phonics application, that students should learn all letter-sound correspon- dences in phonetically-regular words before reading them. |
The tainted term sight words is now passé. Yet the abuse lingers, rebadged as high-frequency words, which include phonetically-regular words taught as sight words that students "read" before they know all their letter-sound correspon- dences. below show how Texas educrats proposed calling such undecod- able words decodable in Texas' new 1st grade Reading standards, but Texas' State Board of Education (SBOE) restored the true phonics definition of decodability. |
Texas' SBOE found that:
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Decodable words are those words within a passage that containletter/sound correspondences that have been taught. In addi- tion, high frequency words and been specifically taught in any previous lessons are considered decodable. Non-decodable words, on the other hand, include regular words for which the sounds for every letter or letter combination or the syllabication rules have not been taught, … and phonetically-irregular words not previously taught. | ||
| Teaching phonetically-regular words on "high-frequency word lists" as sight words does not make them decodable. Previously teaching all their letter-sound correspondences does. Texas 1st grade Reading programs can teach any number |
of still-undecodable phonetically- regular words as sight words. They just cannot count toward Texas' 80% minimum average decodability requirement. But for SBOE mastery of detail, anti-phonics moles would have voided Texas' pro-phonics intent in 1st grade Reading. | |
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