Can someone PLEASE tell me how many high frequency words there are??????

[propercheesed]

DS is currently KS1 at school, I have requested a copy of any high frequency words he should be learning(along side his reading) but surprise surprise access denied!!. Anyone would think I wanted to help my son .

I have googled and googled and I keep getting different answers, please could any teachers or up to speed parents tell me where to find the answer?

Feenie, I did not mean to offend. But would you not agree that a teacher's expectations are paramount in helping a child achieve their potential?

A teacher can have sky high expectations, but if they are using an ineffective method to teach reading their expectations will not be fulfilled.

For eyetracking research Keith Rayner has been a leader in the field for many years now.

Are people aware that Rayner found that only about 7 letters at a time are clearly discerned in a fixation. He did an experiment in which all the letters on either side of the fixated letters were replaced by xxx as the subject read. So the words on which the eyes were fixated wre always clear, but everything else in the line of text was xxx. The subjects were completely unaware of the xxx s. They thought they were reading a normal sentence. (McConkie & Rayner 1975. cited in 'Reading in the Brain' S Dehaene 2009)

No wonder people with tracking problems find reading incredibly difficult. In order to make text coherent it looks as though you have to move smoothly L to R from one group of letters to the next. Otherwise there will be big gaps in the text being read (This is 'learned/trained behaviour' BTW. Readers of Hebrew, which is read from R to L, track from R to L)

If they are using an ineffective method to teach reading and their expectations are not being fulfilled then they should change method. They should keep tweaking their approach until their expectations are fulfilled, or as fulfilled as possible!

You try telling them that, Tgger!!

'But you don't know who those 20% are until it's all gone wrong for them already - there is no way of knowing.'
Nobody has yet answered my question about research to prove the repeated assertion that it is impossible to identify children who have problems learning to read using mixed methods or methods other than pure phonics, or that once they have reached some point in their problems it has all gone wrong.

Me:
'Unless you have studies to show that you def don't you should not dismiss solid research. Studies is not equal to the experience of your DD'.
IndigoBell:
'math - I most certainly have read studies on eye tracking.
WTF do you think I've been doing for the last 6 years? Do you really think I've had DDs eyes fully tested - without understanding the results'

You may have misread the studies as comprehensively as you seem to have misread my post. I have no idea at all what you may have been doing for the last six years. I do not know you and all I know about your DD is what you have reported about her here. You cited no studies debunking eye movement research.

'Maths - That eye movement article you linked to is pretty rubbish.
You def do not skim over most words when you read.'
-- Among other results reported here:
Ballota, Polatsek and Rayner (1985)
'?the data imply that when the word is skipped, only the beginning two or three letters of the parafoveal word were actually identified. Thus, on these occasions, a strong context helps readers to fill in information that is not totally available in their parafovea? (p. 374). '
Skimming is in fact an element of the mechanics of reading.
Words are indeed skipped, it seems.
'Rayner and Well (1996)
'This work effectively confirms findings of other eye-movement studies that show that ?highly constrained target words are skipped (i.e., not directly fixated) more frequently than unconstrained words...(and) when target words are fixated, fixation time is shorter on constrained than unconstrained words? (Rayner & Well, 1996, p. 504). The researchers conclude that "predictability of a word (or the amount of contextual constraint for that word)...will affect both fixation time and word skipping" (p. 507).'
Yes, I know who Kenneth Goodman is.

Maizied
"The only thing that some of the HFWs have going for them is that they enable slightly more 'natural' text to be written."

Would this mean by sticking to that program you describe the children would have to practice their reading skills using purely the books that have been written for that program? They would not be able to read just any text because they haven't learned the rules for the words.

Some children need to be encouraged to read by using books that they have an "intrest" in rather than just the school books. But would a child like this may be discouraged if they are not aloud to read what they find interesting? At what stage of reading would they learn that ph makes an F sound? They would not be able to read a book with elephants in until then. And surely to guarantee that they are learning purely from phonics all books would have to have no pictures to stop the child from guessing or predicting words?

Can a child read any type of book before they have learnt how?

By following a programme such as maizied describes more children will be able to read more words than they could by whole language, sight word methods

And don't worry housework they are allowed to read any book they want for pleasure ...

A lot of the studies I have linked to suggest that reading improves reading, even reading that involves vocabulary a student may not have encountered before or words where patterns they may not have encountered are used.

I think it is safe to assume that most students who are learning to read in a phonics only environment in school will be exposed to books and printed material at home that doesn't follow the carefully graded series used in systematic phonics instruction. Improvements in their reading may or may not be completely attributable to their school experience therefore. Lack of progress may similarly be partially attributable to their experience of reading (or more likely their lack thereof) at home.

Mrz, if by 'before they have learned how' you mean having no exposure to the fact that letters correspond to sounds then the answer is probably yes. But children can learn to read without explicit phonics instruction and the carefully graded reading schemes that go along with it, with a mix of phonics and sight words and with phonics alone. In practice, IRL, children are going to be exposed to a mixture of all methods because they spend part of their lives out of school. I would hazard a guess that many of the children who do not have home exposure to reading are to be found in the ranks of the 20% who fail to learn to read or progress adequately.

If you mean before they have been taught every rule and exception and all the possible quirks of the English language, then no.

I would hazard a guess that many of the children who do not have home exposure to reading are to be found in the ranks of the 20% who fail to learn to read or progress adequately.

Not in my experience, or in the experience of colleagues who home tutor. We meet parents who are mystified by their children's failure to learn to read even though they were read to and surrounded by books. We work with children whose siblings learned to read yet they 'failed'. And, of course, we also find that, whatever their home circumstances, all but a very tiny percentage of the '20%' are able to learn to read without difficulty.

Exposure to books and reading at home has a beneficial effect on cognitive development and educational chances as children who read more develop better vocabularies, better awareness of language and genre and can access more knowledge than children who don't read. But learning to read and what a child does with the skill once they have learned are different things.

Historically, if learning to read had been dependent on home access to books and being read to children of illiterate parents would never have learned. The fact that literacy rates have risen steadily since the 19th century seems to indicate that being surrounded by books and book lovers at home is not a particularly key factor in learning to read.

Great thread, very interesting. Thanks for the interesting links and thoughts, mathanxiety.

So MaizieD, children who are not read to and who do not have books at home and presumably whose parents do not call you in to tutor their children do they all do well in school, become great readers?

There are whole sections of society that are being left behind, and have been left behind since literacy has been measured, notably working class boys, and in some regions, working class boys of certain cultural backgrounds and not others, but boys in general do not seem to do as well as girls in reading and reading-related subjects in school, as a link I provided earlier showed. There is much more to literacy than exposure to phonics.

The major benefit of continuing reading is that it improves your decoding as well as your comprehension skills. You learn to read, and the higher skills associated with reading, by reading.

Parents don't call maizied in to tutor their childAm She works in a mainstream school teaching struggling children to read.

Yes math probably just under half of the children in a class will be able to learn to read to a basic level if they have had sufficient experience of text/books to allow them to "work it out themselves" (without any exposure to direct teaching of any kind). The rest will struggle although a few more will learn if taught to recognise words by sight. Which leaves just under half floundering ...
Now that's fine if your child is one of the first group but not if your child is one of the other two groups.

Can I sum up what I can gather from this? Is this right?

80% of children WERE capable of reading using look and see but that left 20% behind.

With the phonics program it allows these 20% to be able to read, but is also suitable for the 80% who could have read anyway.

A lot of schools use phonics but also have the high frequency words learned by sight.

Even if the school program does not use the high frequency words and sticks to pure phonics they can not control what is happening out side of school and these children may be using look and see methods with parents.

There is lots of conflicting research as to how, once we have learned to read, our brains process the information. Also there is conflicting opinion as to how this program should be taught and when?

*

So phonics is the best program for teaching ALL children to read but no one can say weather learning words by sight along side this is going on and so there is no definitive answer as to if this is ok or not? Is that right?

No Housework
80% of children learnt to read by mixed methods not by Look & Say alone.
With phonics first the figure rises with 90s% of children becoming literate.

Mrz
Do you know how many learned by look and say alone?

I don't think Look and Say has ever been taught in isolation, children have always been taught the alphabetic code (although it was often a sound a week ) alongside whole word learning.

Pure Whole language methods are estimated to work for 40%+ of children but there have never been any real studies and my personal experience suggests it's more like 3% - in the areas I've taught in ...

Most of the reading research comes from the US (it's expensive to run sizeable trials) and there is a huge moral dilemma of using children as guinea pigs for possible reading failure.

In schools where phonics is taught without any sight word learning takes place significantly higher levels of reading are achieved

"The best primary schools in England teach virtually every child to read, regardless of the social and economic circumstances of their neighbourhoods, the ethnicity of their pupils, the language spoken at home and most special educational needs or disabilities.

A sample of 12 of these schools finds that their success is based on a determination that every child will learn to read, together with a very rigorous and sequential approach to developing speaking and listening and teaching reading, writing and spelling through systematic phonics. This approach is applied with a high degree of consistency and sustained."

OFSTED Reading by Six report.

"a determination that every child will learn to read". So, yes, the expectations and attitude of the teacher is essential to success.

Tgger Sat 12-May-12 12:07:09

"a determination that every child will learn to read". So, yes, the expectations and attitude of the teacher is essential to success.

which is why they don't use mixed methods

www.teachfind.com/national-strategies/teaching-high-quality-discrete-systematic-phonic-work

On this link is a document for best practice for teaching synthetic phonics.

It states that the practitioners knowledge should include ...

supporting word recognition for high frequency/irregular words.

So these 12 schools that were taken for the sample could also be using the high frequency word as sight words approach?

do you not think it is very unlikely to find a child that has not learned ANY words by sight? Be that in school or otherwise?

High Frequency words are NOT sight words ... for a start a is a hfw so is in and at and on hardly words you need to learn by sight.

Supporting pupils to recognise these words doesn't translate to memorise.

I can introduce you to some children who haven't learnt ANY words by sight despite their previous teachers trying very hard to teach this way ... and they are just a sample of the many pupils who struggle to recall whole words.

So what exactly does it mean by word recognition?

It's no wonder the professionals disagree on this when the guildlines seem kind of ambiguous to me.