And not everyone agrees with Kevin Wheldall!
I have a number of issues with 'sight words'. The may appear to be a result of my 'opinion' but, as my job for the past few years has been remediating 'struggling readers' at KS3, where it is imperative that they develop and consolidate the necessary skills as quickly as possible to make up for lost time, I have read very widely on the topic of learning to read, (going back to good quantitative research wherever possible) to try to find the most effective strategies.
It seems to me that the emphasis on the need to learn 'sight words' was a strategy developed by proponents of 'look and say' teaching. As children taught by this method can only 'learn' a few words at a time the rationale for teaching 'sight words' was more or less the same as that quoted above from the Multi-Lit programme. The strength of Multi Lit is that it also teaches systematic phonics whereas 'look and say' eschewed all phonics, dismissing it as useless because of the perceived 'irregularity' of English.
The concern I have with 'sight words' in programmes like this is the method of teaching them. If they are taught by 'look and say' then it takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort to teach children a tiny percentage of words from the English lexicon - look at 200 against 250,000plus. I posted some information on another thread about study carried out by Prof. Morag Stuart on teaching children by Look & Say. This is her writing about the study:
Jackie Masterson, Maureen Dixon and I carried out a training experiment (Stuart,Masterson & Dixon, 2000) to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new words in sight vocabulary from repeated shared reading of the same texts. It turned out to be much harder than we expected! We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned.
There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five. We were quite shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126.
Hardly any of these words occurred frequently in any individual child?s pool of vocabulary: on average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times ? yet 36 repetitions had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word.
When we tested children?s ability to read words they?d experienced more than 20 times in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly.
I haven't read the original study but I think one could assume that the subjects were a perfectly 'normal' class of 5y olds. Despite Mnetters' frequent assertions that their dc has only to see a word once and they always remember it, this kind of study, dealing with normal, run of the mill, children, really gives a more realistic picture of the difficulty of 'word learning' with Look & Say'. The most startling contrast with phonics teaching (i.e sounding out and blending words) is that most of those same 'normal, run of the mill, children' would need only two or three repetitions of sounding out and blending a word in order for them to be avle to recognise it instantly (on sight) thereafter. It's a much more efficient process for most children. What is more, Look & Say is slow, word by word, learning whereas, once a child knows, even a few, letter/sound correspondences hundreds of words are instantly available to them with no need to 'learn' anything beyond the correspondences and how to sound out and blend.
I don't know how Multi Lit goes about teaching these 'sight words' but if they're doing it by Look & Say then, in my opinion, on the strength of research such as Prof. Stuart's, they are wasting valuable learning time for minimal benefit.
I also would contend that trying to teach some words as 'Look & Say' is potentially confusing, particularly to children who have greater difficulty in acquiring reading skills, as they do not know how to approach an unfamiliar word. Is it a 'sight word' that they are supposed to already 'know' or should they try sounding out and blending it?
Look & Say also produces inaccurate reading as children do not look very closely at the word; they tend to notice the first letter & word shape and say somthing which might fit. They are also very prone to leaving the endings off words and reversing common words such as 'was/saw', 'of/for' because they don't have a secure 'L to R, all through the word' reading strategy.
I have to say that none of this last paragraph is backed by research evidence and I have had these 'objections' dismissed by Prof. Wheldall because they have no research evidence, but they are behaviours I have observed in many 'mixed methods' taught children over the years; behaviours which you tend not to find in purely phonics taught children.
I could say much more, but I've written rather a lot already!