800 Frequency English Words

[Mireille Kreines]

Takethe word was for example. In the past I would have just shown my kindergarten or first grade students a flashcard with the word was on it and had them say it and repeat the word a few times. After a few weeks of this, the majority of them actually would learn it, despite me not using orthographic mapping to teach words that contain some letters that are making irregular sounds.

Knowing that there is a research based way to teach high-frequency words in a way that will help kids store these words in their long term memories was all I needed to hear to switch from my old ways.

We would practice these words this way for 3 days. Repetition and giving students time to practice is key. Yes, we need to model, but students need to also be engaged. They should be writing and saying the sounds themselves.

As part of the reading tutoring program, I was supposed to introduce a few high frequency words on flash cards to a Kindergarten student. When possible, we were supposed to connect the high frequency words (aka sight words) to the books that we were reading with the child.

Do the first two resonate with you? You probably have students practice reading high frequency words in sentences or even making up their own sentences with the words. And you might have students learn to spell the words.

When students are learning a high frequency word, they need to understand what it means. They need to hear it in the context of a sentence. They should also come up with their own example sentences (orally and/or in writing).

Students need to connect the sounds in a word to the letters in the word. This is sometimes called orthographic mapping, and you can learn more about it in this video:

This discussion happens pretty quickly. At first, it takes longer to go through this process. But as time goes on, students learn the routine and can do most of the work with connecting the sounds to letters.

Hi Rebecca! I am actually not familiar with her method. Generally, though, if it involves teaching students how the sounds in the word relate to the letters, how to spell the words, and the meanings of the words, it likely does use orthographic mapping!

So well done! Great, easy-to-understand definitions. Suggestion: You might advocate more practice time and sentence building with function words e.g., of, was, said which are much harder for students to map than content words e.g., house, farm, dog (Miles, Ehri, 2017).

Not all words use the most common phoneme-grapheme correspondences, but most words are at least partially decodable. Many words appear so frequently in text that children need to learn them before they have been taught the necessary phoneme-grapheme correspondences. The resources in this section provide a range of options for you to teach such words.

Once an irregular word has been introduced and taught, which includes sounding out the decodable parts and recognizing the part(s) that need to be learned by heart, flash cards can be an effective tool for practice. For many readers, irregular words are committed to memory after only a few (1-4) exposures. A struggling reader may need 20 or more exposures to the same word before it can be recognized on sight.

In 1936, E. W. Dolch identified the 220 most common words encountered in the text children read. This high-frequency word list includes many easily decodable words (e.g., it, get) and some words with irregular parts (e.g., was, said). Learning to sound out these words makes committing them to memory much more successful.

I would love to see a blog post on whether to teach sight words/high frequency words, and if there is any useful reason to track whether a student is learning them. My teachers are still teaching them in K and 1st, but more through reading and spelling them, decoding, and encoding them, in and out of text, and not by memorizing their shape. Yet, they are unsure of whether it is worth it to track which words they've learned and how much intervention to provide based on that data.

To help kids develop sight vocabularies in the tens of thousands (which is the real goal), we should provide systematic instruction focused on spelling patterns, relationships between letters and sounds and spellings and pronunciations and meanings. That is where most of our word teaching efforts should be focused.

Just as abstract spelling patterns and grapheme-phoneme correspondences can be generalized to new words, words themselves can serve as analogies facilitating the reading of new words and the application of decoding skills.

No research supports those cautions, and some of the sharpest eyes in the room argue against these groundless claims. For example, Castles, Rastle, and Nation (2018) wrote in response to this question:

I depend upon studies designed to determine if the use of a certain curriculum or instructional approach provides a learning advantage to students; particularly those that consider whether that teaching generalizes to overall reading achievement rather than just gains in the skill taught. That kind of gold standard evidence does not exist with sight word teaching.

Finally, a bit of drill and practice is in order. Reading that word again and again over time helps with memorization. This is where things like flashcards, word rings, word ladders, and the like can come in handy.

When first teaching a word, it is important to isolate it. But remember that one of the purposes for introducing words is to enable earlier text reading. Students should see these words in early instructional texts. They need to be able to read these words not just on flashcards, but in texts. The opportunity to confront these words in varied sentence contexts within controlled vocabulary readers or decodable texts should be part of the ongoing experience that follows their introduction.

Sight word teaching tends to be overdone. Some commercial programs go over the top including way too many words. The National Academy of Education released a report in which the experts recommended that kindergartners master about 18-20 such words (including their names). There is no research on this, but I think that is a reasonable (and smart) recommendation.

I'm surprised by the number of sight words you suggest to be memorized per grade level. This is the amount my former district recommended in its curricula, but it fell short supporting the benchmark that students were expected to read at various points during the year. On the other hand, my district also used a poor resource as its phonics curricula (Fountas and Pinnell), so maybe that explains the disconnect.

Dear Dr. Shanahan,

Thank you so much for this week's blog post! It is very timely and helpful!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Mark Seidenberg's latest blog posts about how the "Science of Reading Movement is moving without much science." You state above "We should provide systematic instruction focused on spelling patterns, relationships between letters and sounds and spellings and pronunciations and meanings" and "Master an extensive set of grapheme-phoneme relationships and spelling patterns." While Seidenberg agrees with that, "Let there be no confusion: Beginning readers need instruction to gain foundational skills," he also states that there is an "Overemphasis on phonics rules, sight words, spelling rules," and that "Learning rules is slow. It is another form of rote learning. Learning a rule has a benefit: generalization. But, costs are very high and rules are not the only basis for generalization. Neural networks generalize without learning rules."

Can you please help explain where that leaves a first grade teacher? How do we sift through all of this information to make informed decisions on what is best to teach our students?

Marie--

My advice is to stay to the "science of reading instruction" rather than the "science of reading." When people are telling you how and what to teach, you should ask for direct evidence that teaching those things or teaching in those ways has been proven to benefit children's learning. If someone says teachers "are teaching too much _______ (fill in the blank)" ask how they know that... how many schools/teachers have they observed in or what survey data are they dealing with? If they say that you should teach a particular thing, ask not about the basic cognitive or psychological research that makes them think that may be true, but about the classroom trials that have been run to test the claim?

I don't believe that practitioners in any field should be determining their practice on the basis of basic science -- the same standard that medical practitioners work under.

tim

Nan--

I gave not just those numbers but an explanation of them and also an argument for why most word time should be spent on decoding (and why even teaching those words is at least partially about decoding). How much phonics were you teaching (the typical study that has shown phonics to benefit kids has been for about 30 mins per day)?

tim

Yes, you did explain those numbers and argue why most word time should be on decoding. The explicit phonics lesson was 10 to 20 minutes with further word practice at work stations or in small group if needed.

Nn--

I didn't say decoding for 10-20 minutes. In past blog entries I've argued for 30 minutes per day based on the research studies that have been done. Up to 5 minutes on sight words and 30 minutes on PA and phonics.

tim

Our district uses sight word assessments as one of our major pieces of data. I find that there are kinders that come to me able to read over 100 word on the list but cannot read them in texts or come close to writing them. Any thought on this? I

Tim, the considerations are clear! Thank you. I work with student teachers using a strategic hand metaphor. The thumb symbolizes development of everything, the index finger symbolizes interests in significant objects, the middle finger symbolizes aspects of activity in the subject according to the curriculum, the ring finger symbolizes productive exercise, and the little finger symbolizes automaticity. Whether we treat texts or words, it always happens dialectically WITH the memory of all and not for the memory, as already Plato differentiated.

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