Sight Words? High-Frequency Words? ❤️ Words?
I’m sure you’ve heard and used the words “sight word” and “high-frequency word” interchangeably. In an effort to clarify our understanding, let’s look at what is typically defined as a sight word vs. a high-frequency word.
Sight words are words that we read instantly without conscious effort. Some sight words are irregularly spelled words. We must imprint the word into our memory because of their irregular spellings. To solidify the word as a sight word we must memorize the irregular portion of the word. Often we hear these words called “heart words”. A heart word is a word that has an irregular spelling that must be learned by heart, while the rest of the word can be decoded. An example is the word “said”. The initial /s/ and final /d/ sounds can be decoded, but the “ai” spelling that says short /e/ sound must be learned by heart.
Reading Rockets and Really Great Reading are great resources with more information on heart word instruction.
Any word can become a sight word once the student orthographically maps the word with automaticity. As students orthographically map words, they become words they recognize by sight. Even decodable words can become sight words. “Cat” is a word that is decodable, but as a student’s reading ability increases the word “cat” becomes a word that they know by sight. This is due to orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is when we store words in our memory permanently (by sight), rather than having to sound out each phoneme in a word every time we see the word. Due to their high-frequency of occurrence, words like “said”, “have”, “cat”, and “dog” become words that we recognize by sight.
The term “high-frequency words” refers to the words that are the most commonly occurring words in the English language. These are words that occur most frequently in written texts. This means that many sight words are also high-frequency words. In the end, the bigger our bank of orthographically mapped words, sight words, the more fluent our reading becomes.
❤️🔤 - Niki
