It is very important that sight words are taught in context and with meaning. They understand them in context even if they are unable to accurately verbalise their meaning. Before learning how to read, a child has already absorbed language & understands the meaning of many words, even abstract words. It is easy to get meaning for a car or boat. How do you explain the word ‘it’ or ‘and’ or ‘if’ or ‘but’? In my experience, the difficulty that many children have with sight words is that most sight words are abstract words and therefore it can be difficult to understand what the word means. In addition to the 220 “service words”, Dolch also put together a list of 95 common nouns which appeared most frequently in children’s books at the time, some of which seem outdated today. So Dolch maintained that teaching children the simplicity of recognising words by sight, they stand a better chance at becoming fluent readers. Although most of the 220 Dolch words are phonetic, children are sometimes told that they can’t be ‘sounded out’ using common sound-to-letter implicit phonics patterns and have to be learned by sight hence the alternative term, ‘sight word’. Unfortunately, English is not a simple a phonetic language and not all words can be sounded out. Many teachers have found this to be true. He referred to these words as ‘tools’ or ‘service’ words because they are used in all writing regardless of subject matter. The Dolch list of 220 words includes conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives and verbs. He had researched children’s books to determine which words were most frequently used and after careful analysis and professional judgment, he derived a list of the most common words, usually referred to as sight words. In 1948, Edward William Dolch PhD, of the University of Illinois, in his book ‘Problems in Reading’ identified a list of words that he believed to be essential for all students to learn first.
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