HOW IT WORKS

Are Sight Words Effective?

How to Teach Sight Words (and How Not To!)

Stanford University’s study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development…

“Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading. In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out “C-A-T” sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word ‘cat,’ and the study found these teaching induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word. This groundbreaking study provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact.” —Dr. Bruce McCandliss

The Stanford University Study on Sight Words and The Brain

The study by Stanford University on sight words and the brain notes that as long as participants used the letter-sound patterns, they were able to read words they had never seen before; and more importantly, that there is no need to memorize what can be read (McCandliss & Noble, 2016).

This study shows why underscoring the traditionally slow pace of existing reading curriculum and phonics instruction with Secret Stories® is so important—particularly at the earliest grade levels—as it provides a way for learners to actually understand the sounds that letters make so that they can read words instead of memorize them.

The Importance of Phonics in Decoding

Knowing the Secrets empowers kids to decode approximately 95% of the most commonly memorized sight words by applying what they know about letter behavior to predict their most likely sounds.

This study, however, may seem of little value to those teaching without the Secrets in early grade classrooms, where overreliance on sight words is far too frequent, due to early learners’ gross lack of skills in comparison to the required text level assessments. To compensate, beginning readers must memorize hundreds of sight words before the end of second grade, often forcing teachers to prioritize teaching the “reading” over teaching the reader.

Sounds-of-Y
Beginning grade learners own so little of the alphabetic code that it’s virtually impossible for them to make sense of the many different sounds that letters make when they come together in words. To compensate, teachers will often rely on the rote memorization of sight words to help students “read.”

Rote memorization is not only developmentally inappropriate for early grade learners, but requires a vast amount of instructional time, energy and resources (assistant and volunteer time, activities, material, etc.) It is also far from ideal from a brain based learning perspective.

The Brain On Sight Words

“Quite apart from anything the teacher does… the student, being human, is a pattern finder, and a pattern maker…” — Dr. David Bronson

The brain is often referred to as the ultimate pattern-making machine, seeking and storing memories based on patterns, or repeated relationships between ideas. Simply put, patterning is the brain’s way of doing things… and Secret Stories® takes full advantage of this.

Secret Stories® feeds the brain’s natural inclination to seek patterns when learning to read by aligning patterns of letter behavior to patterns of kid behavior. Developmentally, it is much easier for very young learners to pattern-out (i.e. make sense of) “behaviors” than abstract phonics patterns. Knowing the “secrets” about letters’ behavior allows beginning and struggling readers to easily predict their most and next most likely sounds in unknown words, just as they would the behavior of their friends and classmates.

Secret Stories® “feeds” the brain’s hunger for patterns when learning to read.

What Exactly is a Sight Word?

Sight words are words that are recognized “by sight,” rather than sounded-out. All words eventually become sight words for experienced readers. For beginning readers, however, a great deal of time and energy is often spent learning sight words, known as “high-frequency” words.

High-frequency words are words that are the most commonly occurring in print. Fry and Dolch Words are examples of high frequency words.

Why Sight Words Don’t Always Work

While many of the listed pre-primer and primer words are easily decodable with letters making sounds that beginning readers would expect, those that are highlighted contain Secrets, which when taught traditionally as phonics “rules” span three to four grade level years to learn. This is far too long to make learners wait for the whole code (Allington, 2016).

“Typically, the first 100 high frequency aren’t mastered by most kids until Thanksgiving or so of first grade… and that is with considerable effort.”—Dr.Tim Shanahan

For example, some children do not even have a concept of a word or understanding of the word boundaries in print and how these map to letters, and yet they are memorizing letter sequences in “sight words.”

Additionally, a great deal of sight word instruction occurs before children even have a concept of how letters actually come together to make words. Instructional emphasis at the earliest grade levels is on memorizing random letter sequences, rather than learning how to decode easily decodable text. Before beginning learners even understand the alphabetic principle they are “calling” words. Without a concept of word or alphabetic insight, children will have the mistaken impression that words are unsystematic, making learning not only inefficient (Duke, 2016), but in total opposition with how our brains learn best, which is patterning.

Additionally, rote memorization requires brain storage, which is not limitless. In deciding what to remember, our brains ask “Do I need this?… Does it make sense?” If not, the information is relegated to the “use it or lose it” system, for which every learner has a unique threshold for how many times they must use a skill so as not to lose it.

Most often, it is the learners who need the most “use-it” time who get the least, marking the beginning of what quickly emerges as an “un-level playing field” for struggling readers. Kids who can seem to be learning to read can suddenly hit a wall in second grade or third grade when the brain’s finite storage for memorized words runs out. But kids who know the Secrets don’t have to memorize sight words. They can just read them.

Secret Stories Phonics for Teaching Sight Words

Secret Stories® vs. Sight Words

Teach the READER, Not the Reading!

The “prize” for memorizing a sight word is ONE word.

Secret Stories® Phonics— No More Sight Words

The prize for learning a Secret is HUNDREDS! teaching-phonics-in-guided-reading

Which would you rather do?

Kids who know the Secrets have early access to high leverage phonics skills that would otherwise take years to acquire. Underscoring the traditionally slow pace of phonics skill introduction in the reading series (or adopted phonics program) with Secret Stories® saves teachers and students countless hours of instructional time, allowing them to get twice as far in half the time, and with half the effort.