Phonics testing. Why not sight words as well?

[proudmama72]

Just that really. There's was extra effort put into phonics data collection. Would it not also to be beneficial to test knowledge of sight words. They seemed to impact my kids reading development.

Phonics is important, but just wondering why all the extra resources and emphasis solely on phonics.

acquiring a few extra words they can't sound out yet

You don't seem to appreciate that we are not talking about a 'handful' of words when talikng about what children are initially being taught. The 'old' NLS had a list of 45 HFWs which were to be 'learned' in R & Y1. Letters & Sounds (current govt guidance) has a list of 100 words to be covered by 'Phase 5', which should be taught by end Y1. If the children I worked with got so confused with only 45 words over 2 years, what would they have done with double that in the same period?

But it is still not necessary to teach these words as 'wholes', as I, and others, have frequently pointed out. When you are teaching a class you don't know which ones you are damaging by teaching words as 'wholes' until you have actually damaged them. Which looks pretty unfair to me.

Whereas going the phonic route damages none of the class.

She's not talking about the NLS or Letters & Sounds, maizie. She's talking about the link that bruffin gave her on the previous page page. So, berating her on her lack of appreciation of past and unrelated phonicsy stuff is both unfair and irrelevant.

Why not let her just have her conversation. It's a public forum.

Letters & Sounds has a list of 100 words for reception alone plus another 200 words for Y1 & 2.

It isn't neurological harm we are talking about but pedogogical harm ...

Well then, why don't you and maisie talk to each other about it, regardless of what kind of harm it is and let other people talk about other things if that's what they want to do.

There's no reason to try to force people to talk about pedogogical harm if they're quite happy talking about something totally different.

catkind you seem to be focusing on the schwa in the - as I have said the schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. It can be spelt in a number of ways

a in about, salad and Coca cola
e in the and open
er in after and Severn
o in bacon
u in genius
ou in obvious
ar in sugar
or in actor
our in colour
ure in picture
ur in Arthur
ai in certain
yr in martyr
ae in Michael

these are a few examples and of course there many many other words

the important thing is your child can actually hear the sounds

Letters & Sounds is very optimistic in believing that a child will acquire a sight word from a few repetitions over the course of a lesson.
Stuart, Masterson and Dixon carried out an experiment to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new, whole words in memory from repeated shared reading of the same look-say texts. It turned out to be much harder than they had expected: They 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.

In a later experiment they concluded that

Children who can apply phonic knowledge to read unfamiliar words will build a store of ‘sight vocabulary’ more quickly.
•This is because left-to-right decoding of each grapheme forces attention sequentially on to each letter of the unfamiliar word.
•This sequential attention to each grapheme increases the likelihood that the child will form an accurate memory of the spelling pattern.

They cite further studies
Share (1999)
Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich & Share (2002).
Bowey & Muller (2005)
Nation, Angell & Castles (2006)

"What method would you say that link is advocating bruffin? It talks about "irregular" words in the section on Lexical knowledge. "Ask the child to find five words in a book or a list that are "not spelled the way they sound." Further, ask the child how each word would be pronounced if you just "sounded it out.

It's asking the child to apply phonic knowledge - they can hear the sounds in the words and recognise that the spelling isn't the one they know at this stage

Because e-uh is the correspondence in "the", one of the first tricky words they learn. And as far as I know there aren't any more e-uh correspondences in the words taught in reception, certainly not up to phase 3 where they're at now at my son's school. Knowing a different schwa spelling isn't going to help them decode the. (My son was taught "er" for example.)

Hearing the sounds is not the problem, they don't have to know a correspondence to hear the sound and segment.

Most of the 100 HFW are decodable using code they know so that's a bit of a false trail.

If it doesn't do neurological harm for DS to pick up sight words on his own by watching me read, how can it do neurological harm for him to pick up sight words where his teacher has segmented it into sounds for him and told him that some of them are ones he'll learn later?

The quick answer is it doesn't because the teacher is teaching him phonics ... the problem arises when a teacher tells the child this/these words can't be decoded so you must learn the whole word. Often this is done with no reference to letters (certainly not to sounds) and the child is expected to look at the shape of the word and memorise it.

The first schwa word a child will probably meet is a

The quick answer is it doesn't because the teacher is teaching him phonics ... the problem arises when a teacher tells the child this/these words can't be decoded so you must learn the whole word. Often this is done with no reference to letters (certainly not to sounds) and the child is expected to look at the shape of the word and memorise it.
So if it is presented as "words you can't decode yet" would you have less of a problem with it? I think it may have been maizie saying that the fact of learning words by sight set up incorrect neurological pathways.

Even in the dark old days when I learned we'd use the phonics we knew as clues, e.g. the beginning with th, me beginning with m.

I think it may have been maizie saying that the fact of learning words by sight set up incorrect neurological pathways.

you asked "how can it do neurological harm for him to pick up sight words where his teacher has segmented it into sounds for him and told him that some of them are ones he'll learn later?"

but this isn't learning the word by sight ... this is teaching decoding ie phonics.

So if it is presented as "words you can't decode yet" would you have less of a problem with it?
no catkind that is what maizieD means by learning words by sight

I think it may have been maizie saying that the fact of learning words by sight set up incorrect neurological pathways.

I don't think I said quite that. I said that trying to learn words as 'wholes', no attention to the letters/sounds within it, just attempting to remember it by its over all appearance, shape, etc. sets up the wrong 'pathways'.

There is a fundamental confusion over the meaning of 'sight'. Skilled readers read most words 'by sight' in that they appear to 'know' the word without having to consciously process it in any way. It was this appearance of knowing the word on sight that caused former educators to assume that the stage of learning letter/sound correspondences and decoding & blending wasn't actually necessary; that all that had to be done was to teach children to recognise them as global 'wholes'.

Because of the complexity of English spelling, even though phonics made something of a comeback (and never really went away altogether) the idea of 'sight words' got muddled up with the idea that some words are 'not decodable' (an idea engendered by educators not understanding how the complex English alphabetic code works) and has come down to us as an assumption that some words are just 'sight words'. Of course, they are not, as I said earlier, most words are 'sight words to skilled readers, but the idea persists.

I do try never to refer the words with uncommon correspondences as 'sight words' because I don't want to perpetuate the misunderstanding.

Odd choice of quote from Stuart, Masterson and Dixon. The method you describe of just showing them books proved to be the least efficient of the methods they tested. Children did better at learning sight words when the words were given on flashcards. And in the other test, when they were prompted with the phonic correspondences they knew, not necessarily taught all the phonic correspondences in the word if you're talking about the two studies reported in their 2000 paper?

It's also an experimental situation designed to make learning the words difficult - there'd be nothing to measure if all the children in both samples learned all the words. Who in real life would try to teach 16 new things simultaneously in parallel? I'd expect a much higher rate of success in a real life one or two words a lesson approach.

But if you teach 5 phonic sounds (which at the recommended speed of, initially, 1 per day, takes a school week) then a child xca read hundreds of words.

If you teach 1 or 2 perr day, at the end of a week they can read 10 at maximum.

Just from an efficiency argument, teaching the 'key' to decoding hundreds and hundreds of words has to be a more sensible approach to learning to read....

I was pointing out that learning words doesn't happen in a 20 min lesson as the Letters & Sounds doc may suggest

but this isn't learning the word by sight ... this is teaching decoding ie phonics.
The difference I'm trying to get at is whether what the child is asked to recall the whole word or the constituent sounds?

You seemed adamant earlier that the child has to recall the constituent sounds. In which case they have learned that GPC, much earlier than the phonics programmes seem to recommend. And child would be sounding out the word.

Alternatively teacher could segment to show the children how the word fits together, but only ask the children to repeat it once or twice, then concentrate on getting the children to recall the whole word. Then use that word as an example to make that correspondence easy to learn when it comes around in the programme with lots more examples later. This way the child would be learning it as a sight word more directly, but still understand that it can be split down and be able to use the phonic bits they do know as my DS does.

Which is why you do phonics with a handful of sight words teacher, not sight words every day of the week. The sight words being ones that are really useful words, but have phonics you don't want to introduce just yet.

If you are teaching phonics you do not teach any sight words

Once again catkind when you teach the high frequency words that contain spellings for sounds the child hasn't been taught at that point you do so by teaching the word as you would any other word by decoding it sound by sound and teaching the new piece of information (the new sound spelling correspondence) they need in order to decode the word using phonics. You do NOT teach it as a sight word.

I asked: "how can it do neurological harm for him to pick up sight words where his teacher has segmented it into sounds for him and told him that some of them are ones he'll learn later?"

you said: "but this isn't learning the word by sight ... this is teaching decoding ie phonics."

I explained in more detail what I meant. You now think that what I was describing is learning words by sight and is harmful.

So back to the original question then.

if his teacher is teaching him to read the high frequency words by segmenting he is not being taught sight words catkind

This method, is this sight words or not?
"Alternatively teacher could segment to show the children how the word fits together, but only ask the children to repeat it once or twice, then concentrate on getting the children to recall the whole word. Then use that word as an example to make that correspondence easy to learn when it comes around in the programme with lots more examples later. This way the child would be learning it as a sight word more directly, but still understand that it can be split down and be able to use the phonic bits they do know as my DS does."
I may have misunderstood which post you were answering.

once again
once again
how many times have we said this
once again
what you do not seem to grasp is....

If what people keep banging on about makes no sense then it is impossible to grasp.

It's a bit of a mish mash neither one or the other

CG