“You looked at the word and checked the letters!” I cheered, after the five year old sitting next to me independently went back and corrected his word attempt.
“No, I didn’t!” came the indignant reply.
“But that’s what good readers do - they look at the word and check the letters.”
“Oh!” light dawned across the little boy’s face, “I didn’t know that!”
My observations, from listening to this summer-born, Year 1 child read to me for the first time, strongly suggested he believed he needed to ‘remember’ and ‘know’ the words on the pages in front of him. When he came across an unknown word, his default responses were: “I don’t know that one” or “Can’t remember”. Although much time had been spent teaching him letter-sound correspondences, he seemed to have picked up the message that reading was all about memorising words - until he knew them by sight.
‘Sight words’ have had a lot of coverage this week. Last Friday, a guest post from Professor Anne Castles, questioned the potential of children being taught sight words alongside phonics (stimulating an excellent discussion on the Read Oxford website).
“No, I didn’t!” came the indignant reply.
“But that’s what good readers do - they look at the word and check the letters.”
“Oh!” light dawned across the little boy’s face, “I didn’t know that!”
My observations, from listening to this summer-born, Year 1 child read to me for the first time, strongly suggested he believed he needed to ‘remember’ and ‘know’ the words on the pages in front of him. When he came across an unknown word, his default responses were: “I don’t know that one” or “Can’t remember”. Although much time had been spent teaching him letter-sound correspondences, he seemed to have picked up the message that reading was all about memorising words - until he knew them by sight.
‘Sight words’ have had a lot of coverage this week. Last Friday, a guest post from Professor Anne Castles, questioned the potential of children being taught sight words alongside phonics (stimulating an excellent discussion on the Read Oxford website).
On Saturday, Pat Stone posted a YouTube video on Twitter of Torin the toddler selecting word cards by sight, as he performed for his dad (I trawled through the video stream searching for a clip of Torin cuddled up with one of his parents, enjoying a storybook together. I was sad not to find any.)
On Tuesday evening, BBC Four screened a documentary ‘B is for Book’. In the programme, we saw five year old Stephan sitting at the table at home, diligently trying to memorise words from a set of cards.
The observations I shared at the beginning, highlight a possible flip-side to teaching words by sight-recognition. If we lead children to believe reading is about knowing words off-by-heart, don’t we risk causing them unnecessary confusion - and presenting reading as a daunting (if not impossible) task?
Instead, I’d argue that we need to provide children with a self-extending system - a schema, if you like - which they can keep adding to, and building on. I aim for my young pupils to become secure in their understanding that letters and letter combinations represent sounds (yes, even tricky ones like the ‘ai’ in ‘said’ and the ‘oul’ in ‘could’/'should'/'would'), whilst equipping them with the skills to use and apply the alphabetic code as they read and spell.
The more experienced a reader becomes, the more likely they are to recognise words by sight - not because they have spent hours learning isolated words, but because they have repeatedly attended to the letter detail in these words when reading and spelling them.
I am a one-to-one, literacy intervention teacher. I only see some of my pupils once a week, for a half-an-hour lesson. Every minute counts. Should children be spending valuable time attempting to visually memorise isolated words? I don’t think so.
Instead, I’d argue that we need to provide children with a self-extending system - a schema, if you like - which they can keep adding to, and building on. I aim for my young pupils to become secure in their understanding that letters and letter combinations represent sounds (yes, even tricky ones like the ‘ai’ in ‘said’ and the ‘oul’ in ‘could’/'should'/'would'), whilst equipping them with the skills to use and apply the alphabetic code as they read and spell.
The more experienced a reader becomes, the more likely they are to recognise words by sight - not because they have spent hours learning isolated words, but because they have repeatedly attended to the letter detail in these words when reading and spelling them.
I am a one-to-one, literacy intervention teacher. I only see some of my pupils once a week, for a half-an-hour lesson. Every minute counts. Should children be spending valuable time attempting to visually memorise isolated words? I don’t think so.