Professor Anne Castles on 'sight words'

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

I've already posted a link to Professor Anne Castles' guest blog posting via the Read Oxford blog, but I thought I'd start a new thread as there are some interesting replies and further responses via other forums.

So, if you are interested in this topic, read Anne's blog posting first here:

http://readoxford.org/guest-blog-are-si ... y-slighted

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

In response to the conversation about 'sight words' via the Read Oxford forum and other forums, Sir Jim Rose drew attention to an extract (see red lettering) from Reading in the Brain (Dehaene):

Chapter 5

Learning to Read

Learning to read involves connecting two sets of brain regions that are already present in infancy: the object recognition system and the language circuit. Reading acquisition has three major phases: the pictorial stage, a brief period where children "photograph" a few words; the phonological stage, where they learn to decode graphemes into phonemes; and the orthographic stage, where word recognition becomes fast and automatic. Brain imaging shows that several brain circuits are altered during this process, notably those of the left occipital-temporal letterbox area. Over several years, the neural activity evoked by written words increases, becoming selective, and converges onto the adult reading network.

These results, although preliminary, are rich in implications for education. Above all, we now understand why the whole-language method deluded so many psychologists and teachers, even though it does not fit with the architecture of our visual brain.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Mandy Nayton wrote:

This has been a great conversation ... [and I]... just wanted to make a few brief points ..

a) As has already been pointed out – I don’t believe there is a great deal of concern about the simultaneous teaching of small batches of both high frequency words (many of which are easily decodable) and irregular words (in tandem with an effectively taught structured synthetic phonics program) - in order to provide developing readers with access to connected text.

b) I do think there is a growing trend to introduce long lists of (sometimes as many as 300) words to children before they start learning any phonics and suggest this may – as pointed out by Kerry – have negative consequences … If too many irregulars are taught too soon, the student may lose faith in the decoding process as viable. .. It is certainly the case that I have seen many students in remote aboriginal communities with a large bank of sight words, but absolutely no decoding ability whatsoever. They really have approached reading as a task of visual memory, rather than a language-based task (and there are, of course, some phonological differences that make this a more complex task for ESL and ESD learners). The students are often very jaded with reading (and spelling) instruction in general (having received years of instruction of one kind or another) – making it far more difficult to introduce a well-structured phonics program. It’s as though they have hit an ‘instructional brick wall”. (I realise these are my observations only – so hardly robust evidence!) – and,

c) In terms of the comment made by Max … English has words whose pronunciation can only be got by learning the pronunciation of the word as a whole. …. I’m not sure that I completely agree with this. I think it is true to say that English has words whose pronunciation (and spelling) can only be determined once the semantic value of the word is known … such as read and read (He read the book yesterday / I will read the book tomorrow) …. At the risk of appearing contrary … I don’t actually consider the examples provided – mood, good and goon - to be irregular – they are from different word families underpinned by different P-G relationships (moon, boon, croon, hoon, food etc.); and, (good, hood, book, stood, etc.). We need to be familiar with the word, as well as the word’s meaning, in order to know how to pronounce it. It is certainly true that English has a complex orthography with an extensive range of P-G relationships - but that doesn’t mean we don’t initially decode m-oo-d or g-oo-d or g-oo-n ….even if we initially mispronounce the words and then self-correct. I realise that the desired outcome is fluent and automatic / effortless word reading (accuracy) but genuinely believe that for the vast majority of words, the most successful path to achieving this is via the phonics route (with some high frequency and ‘tricky’ words thrown in for good measure!).

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Alison Clarke writes a great post via her blog 'spelfabet' and admits to being a 'disser' of sight words!

Dissing, choosing and teaching sight words

http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2016/07/dis ... ght-words/