However, our gut-level instincts lead us astray here.
Intuitively, it would seem to make sense to have students memorize the words that they are going to read or spell most often. Which High Frequency Words Not to Teach and Whyĭon’t pass out flashcards or lists of high frequency reading or spelling words for students to memorize. We are only at the beginning stages of brain research.Ī prudent approach to both beginning and remedial reading instruction is to focus on decoding (phonics) and encoding (spelling) instruction and practice, but to also “throw in” a healthy dose of fluency practice with high frequency words. We know some things, but we don’t know a lot of things about reading. The Look-Say Method of the Dick and Jane readers (sight words only instruction) and the Onset-Rime Method (b-ack, h-ack, j-ack, l-ack, p-ack, r-ack, s-ack, t-ack) have largely been placed on the dustbin of instructional approaches. We have plenty of reading research to positively assert that explicit, systematic phonics instruction is the most efficient approach to teaching beginning and remedial readers. These are prerequisite skills which students need in order to to read well.
Reading does not teach phonemic awareness, nor does reading teach phonics and multi-syllabic decoding. Witness the plethora of reading intervention classes in upper elementary and middle schools to see how many of our students can “read,” but not understand what they are “word calling.” How we get to the end result does matter. In other words, the end result is not all that matters. It’s not a which came first, the chicken or the egg? question some still suggest.
Most teachers and reading specialists advocate some teaching of high frequency words: the question is which ones make sense to teach and which ones don’t make sense to teach?įirst, let’s dispel a few notions about how we learn to read.