Clearing Up Terminology

Teachers often encounter confusion regarding the term ‘sight words’. It’s crucial to clarify that sight words represent instructional outcomes, not instructional inputs. Words become ‘sight words’ only once students can automatically read them through the process of orthographic mapping.

Associate Professor Lorraine Hammond humorously summarises this concept: ‘Every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up.’

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.

The Role of Orthographic Mapping

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).

Teaching Irregular High-Frequency Words

Explicitly teaching a small, judiciously selected set of high-frequency words can support early fluency without undermining phonics skills (Dixon et al., 2002; Shapiro & Solity, 2016). Teaching these words with irregular or more difficult spellings to beginning readers is required for sentence reading and dictation. Importantly, we need these ‘Heart Words’ to access early reading material such as decodable readers. PLD recommends that even these selected words should be taught through orthographic mapping rather than purely memorised visually.

Facilitating Orthographic Mapping

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.

3. Group Similar HFWs

Enhance pattern recognition by grouping words with similar irregularities or phonetic patterns:

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. 

Reference List

Castles A, Rastle K and Nation K (2018) ‘Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert’, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1):5–51.

Dehaene S, Pegado F, Braga LW, Ventura P, Nunes Filho G, Jobert A, Dehaene-Lambertz G, Kolinsky R, Morais J and  Cohen L (2010) ‘How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language’, Science, 330:1359–1364.

Dixon M, Stuart M and Masterson J (2002) ‘The relationship between phonological awareness and the development of orthographic representations’, Reading and Writing, 15:295–316.

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific studies of reading, 18(1), 5-21.

Katz L and Frost SJ (2001) ‘Phonology constrains the internal orthographic representation’, Reading and Writing, 14:297–332.

Shapiro LR and Solity J (2016) ‘Differing effects of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading development’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 86(2):182–203.