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?

I didn't say that this was a method of learning to read! It's in my bag of "other ways" that some children learn to read once basic phonics are established. Part of the bigger picture.

I would say it's a way to learn to write. But not read, unless you mean to help guess/predict a word - but that's not reading.

So how do you stop brains doing this?

Doing what? If you 'predict' a word in your head, you still read that word to check it's what you predicted it would be.

Ok, and if you "read" it to a parent who confirms that your prediction is right and memorise it for the next time you see it, then yes, this has become part of your method of learning to read.

Brilliant.

Except that, for 20% of children, it doesn't work.

I'm not proposing this as a way to learn to read. NOT A WAY TO LEARN TO READ. (thought I said this before), but it's what some children/adults do, it's a way some brains work and isn't an awareness of this good rather than saying "No, No, No!"

I'm not proposing that you stop children from naturally remembering words when they have read them - far from it. As long as they are reading them, and not just predicting/guessing. But some schools and teachers do think that this is a method to learn to read, to many children's detriment.

Well that's a judgement call for schools and parents. Please don't label it bad per se though as it's not. It's something that should be utilised and enjoyed, but like everything it's how it's used that can sometimes be bad.

Label what - the guessing, or the learning of sight vocabulary?

I speak as I find - my job is to ensure every single child in my school learns to read successfully. Encouraging them to use prediction isn't reading, and doesn't help. Teaching using sight vocabulary meant that several children left our school unable to read, in the early 90s.

20% of children - that's one in every 5, which is a lot when you are a teacher. So, I think, using my experience, that I will label it as bad per se - and teaching using it is a bad judgement call for schools.

We're talking at cross purposes. I'm saying it's an extra tool in the armoury of reading and something beautiful that brains do. I wouldn't encourage it directly, I think I said this before. I'm not advocating it as a replacement for phonics. If you close your mind to it and label it as bad then you have limited your awareness to what the process of reading is for many children.

If you can predict by recognizing enough about the word,

What would you recognise about the word? How much of the word do you have to recognise before you can 'predict' it? What do you do when there's no-one sitting beside you to tell you if you are right or wrong?

TBH all this 'predicting' seems like a bl**dy waste of effort when all you have to do is sound out and blend the word. If the phonics is secure you can do that without much, if any, conscious effort.

I have to think very carefully about the phonics in it as I don't know them myself.

Frankly, before I started working with phonics I don't think I could have helped a child sound out a word either. I wouldn't have had any problem with working out unfamiliar words that I came across in my own reading, I just couldn't have made explicit what I did to work them out.

In fact, it never occurred to me to try phonics with a child! I would just tell them the word they were stuck on and then wonder why the hell they hadn't remembered it when they encountered it on the next page! And the 'dyslexia' programme I was trained on was so complex and had so many baffling 'rules' that I couldn't work it out, let alone the poor confused kids I was let loose on!

When you have been frustrated by a few years of 'supporting' struggling readers without any real understanding of how reading actually 'works', and without seeing much improvement in the children, it is an absolute revelation to find how simple and how successful a phonics approach is.

I know this sounds a bit cheesy and evangelistic, but when you see children who have been virtually written off by their primary school actually just reading stuff and taking it completely for granted that they can read it does bring a little tiny glow of pride to the..... wherever pride is manifested

Ah well. So much is subconscious. I don't know is the answer, re predicting- how much of the word etc. And it's no effort at all maisieD, or at least this is the way it seems with my DS (sample of children 1 I know ).

There must be an overlap between learning phonics rules and coming across words within a context/memorising them. Children learn in different ways. Yes, they should all be taught phonics. Phonics is the best way to learn to read. I want to empasize this too. BUT I also want to emphasize that there is a lot more going on when children learn to read than just learning phonics rules. DS would rather not stop and blend if he can help it. Don't worry, I make sure he does (although this is when I have to work it out myself), and I am rather disappointed when this is rejected by many MNetters.

Sorry, got your name wrong maizieD .

Also, after going through RWI books up to yellow with DS I have learnt a fair few phonics . Have to stop and think though- shows me that I didn't learn to read this way!

I learned to read soooooo long ago that I don't have the faintest notion about how I was taught! But, apart from being stumped by the word 'penny' in Y1 (a moment I remember vividly) I don't think I have ever had a problem in working out what a word 'says'. And, when I was stumped by the said word, the teacher 'told' me what it was and I never had a problem with it again. I still wouldn't advocate it as a method, though!

I don't know about the 'children learn in different ways' thing. They all have to learn the same thing, and, according to my latest book purchase ('Reading in the Brain', a neuroscientist's study of how the brain 'works' during reading) the same brain areas are activated by reading, whatever the orthography, the language, the orientation of the text or the sound/symbol correpondences. Now, I just wonder; if everyone 'learned differently' might not this tend to activate different areas in the brain? I don't know. Just speculating...

Yes, they do learn in different ways. We play to our strengths. Not just children, adults too. We are all wired a bit differently and influenced by our individual experiences. A lot the same too though. Now I must go to bed, brain a bit fuddled by two lovely glasses of red wine .

'I also fail to see how the ability to read exactly what is on the page is an impediment to understanding what is written on the page.'

The ability to read what is on the page is of course linked to understanding what is on the page, but decoding is only half the battle. So far, it appears that understanding what is on the page is accomplished better by children who have not had the phonics early and first experience.

Another roundup of research with many studies cited.

'Teaching phonics first and only, as some people urge, is a good way of separating children who can do isolated phonics from those who can't, but it is not a good way to teach children to read, since reading is much more than attacking words. Phonics first-and-only can be particularly difficult and limiting for children whose prior experiences with books have been quite limited. Furthermore, we should not assume that children or adults who have difficulty recognizing and/or sounding out words cannot comprehend texts effectively; indeed, even "dyslexic" readers can often comprehend well (Fink, 1995/96; Weaver, 1994c), because of the redundancy of language and the knowledge they bring to texts. Research suggests that our best plan may be to teach phonics and phonemic awareness in the context of reading and writing, to all children; provide tutoring for children who need more individualized and/or more direct help with phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and/or using these skills as part of effective reading strategies; and possibly to discontinue such help for children who have benefited little from a year's daily individualized tutoring, while increasing the emphasis on developing strategies for deriving meaning.'

'One point which papers like this fail to make clear is that comprehension is a language based skill, not a reading skill.'
'I'm not proposing that you stop children from naturally remembering words when they have read them - far from it. As long as they are reading them, and not just predicting/guessing.'
MaizieD, at this point I have to confess I do not know what you mean when you use the term 'reading'.

So your point is that phonics shouldn't be taught to the exclusion of comprehension?

Well, duh-uh.

As you say, this was identified 20 years ago.

No, that wasn't my point.

I have been reading this with interest and am now completely lost.

With my reception DD I am reading her books with her and we sound everything out (Kipper and Songbirds), apart from words like 'was', 'the', 'said' etc, which I have put onto cards and she learns them as 'sight words' - I tell her that they are really hard to sound out.

Am I condemning her to failure?? (Serious question)

What about other books we read, such as Green Eggs and Ham or her library books?

Letters and Sounds recommends they are taught as partially decodable with a tricky 'bit'. That is to say that they are likely to be grapheme phoneme correspondences that the children just won't have come across - yet.

'was' is quite easy when you tell children that when following a 'w' an 'a' normally makes a short 'o' sound (was, wash, want).

'the' isn't that difficult when a child knows 'th'

'said' - 's' and 'd' are easy, and just say that in this word the 'ai' is making an short 'e' sound.

Feenie, why not just use the sight reading method? Teaching a rule that applies to maybe three words seems to me to be more an example of doing something just to prove a point than to actually teach the most efficient way to approach a certain word (or three words).

The whole point of sight words is that they get the tricky bits that crop up over and over again in children's early reading without getting in the way of teaching them the more regular correspondences.

Said, the and was are fundamental words that need to be recognised to the point of automaticity very early.

Because human memory isn't finite and those children who start off well recalling words by sight reach their limit (usually around the age of 8) and have no strategies for reading new words

Mrz, we are not talking about teaching 2000+ words by sight.