Sight word lists such as, Oxford 500, Magic 300 and Fry word lists are high-frequency words (HFWs) commonly found in children’s texts. However, the term ‘sight words’ has commonly misled teachers that these words should be learnt as a whole or by sight. PLD recognises that learning HFWs is valuable but instead embeds them within a structured synthetic phonics (SSP) program so that students can read and spell any word. The PLD program refers to high-frequency words as either “Heart Words” (words with an irregular aspect of spelling) or “Flash Words” (regular and easily decodable words). Both of these need to be repeatedly decoded until read quickly and automatically.

Flash Words: HFW that are regular and decodable. These words are used frequently, and so students need repeated decoding and encoding practice, so that they can be recognized (read) and reproduced (spelled) in a flash.

Heart Words: HFWs that contain an irregular concept which cannot be decoded or a complex phonic concept not yet learned. The difficult part of these words must be learned by heart.

We now know that orthographic mapping (the process of explicitly connecting sounds to letters) is more effective than visual memorisation techniques of a whole word (Ehri, 2014). Contrary to popular misconceptions, reading is not a visual memory activity (Dehaene et al., 2010). Instead, proficient reading occurs through regular and frequent exposure to words which leads to the storage of strong representations of those letter patterns for quick retrieval (Castles et al., 2018; Katz & Frost, 2001).

1. Establish Pre-Literacy Foundations – Before introducing HFWs, ensure students master foundational skills:

• Phonemic awareness: blending and segmenting sounds within words.
• Letter-sound correspondences: accurately recognising letters by their associated sounds.

Mastery of these skills provides the necessary foundation for successful decoding and orthographic mapping.

2. Teach from Simple to Complex Spellings – Progress instruction from simpler, regular spelling patterns to more complex and irregular patterns:

• Simple and frequent spellings: e.g., mat, pit.
• More irregular spellings: e.g., said, young.
• Highly irregular spellings: e.g. eye, one.

As students develop their reading skills, gradually introduce more challenging patterns, supporting their conceptual understanding of written language.

4. Explicitly Teach the Irregular Components

By clearly identifying the “tricky” parts we can easily orthographically map the word. For instance, in the word said, clarify that the tricky part is “ai” representing the sound /e/, while “s” and “d” remain easily decodable.

5. Integrate High-Frequency Word Instruction within Systematic Phonics

Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) should incorporate teaching HFWs strategically. Using decodable texts can introduce a limited set of frequent but irregular spelled words (e.g., my, the, I) supporting early reading fluency. 

PLD provides a clear scope and sequence to teaching the phonic knowledge required to read and spell while integrating HFWs. For more information and links to the HFW charts click here.