Rethinking Sight Words

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this article is to rethink how sight words are categorized in early childhood classrooms. Three categories of words (regularly spelled, temporarily irregularly spelled, and permanently irregularly spelled) are presented as a way to think about the orthographic representations of words and how these representations interact with students’ grapheme–phoneme knowledge. Five kindergarten students were trained on explicit grapheme–phoneme mapping of 10 regularly spelled sight words during eight sessions lasting approximately 10 minutes each. Results demonstrated significant improvement from pretest to posttest on reading target words ( p = 0.013, Cohen's d = 1.93) and nontarget words ( p = 0.005, Cohen's d = 1.93). These preliminary findings indicate that the use of the categorization scheme based on student knowledge coupled with direct and explicit instruction of words that were previously taught as whole units may be an efficient and effective instructional method for securing regularly spelled sight words in memory.