| 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 correspondences 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 correspondences.
Deletions and insertions below show how Texas educrats proposed calling such undecodable 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:
- "High-frequency
word lists" include
phonetically-
regular words.
- Teaching them as
sight words does
not make them
decodable.
- Pretending that
it does, artificially
inflates decodability
scores.
|
Decodable words are those words within a passage that contain letter/sound correspondences that
have been taught. In addition, high frequency words that appear on the Eeds (1985) list of high frequency words and phonetically-irregular
words that have been specifically taught in any previous lessons are considered decodable. Non-decodable words, on the other hand, include
words not on the list of high frequency words, phonetically-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. |
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