Teacher Discussion Forums

And you say MY explanation is muddled. You realy need to read my posts again. Nowhere do I say that sight vocabulary is words learned but not decoded. That is entirely your construct I say that sight vocabulary is words which have been learned because they have been encountered so many times in read...

As concentrating on sight vocabulary can at best make children progress from illiteracy to semi-literacy the question is 'why bother?' How on earth do you arrive at this very odd assumption. An effective sight vocabulary contains three quarters of the the words which we will, on average, encounter i...

I believe it to be possible to cite research that will prove almost anything. Whether or not there is a dedicated area of the brain to store the images of words is not in my view significant. It is only significant that when we see a word we have seen many times before, we recognise it and can voice...

I think you have to get away from the idea that you are either a ‘phonics person’ or a ‘whole word’ person. Tens of millions of people (including myself) succeeded in learning to read without formal instruction in phonics. Equally, vast numbers learned to read by the phonics route. There can be no d...

Jotham says ‘it seems to lend credence to the notion that we still engage in some analysis of the parts’ Is it not a given that we analyse everything we see? The concept of ‘sight vocabulary’ has many precedents in visual memory. When we see something of the very first time, we analyse it closely in...

Stephen says 'I have difficulty with the idea that the shape of the word as a graphic is stored in memory. I believe what is stored in memory is the phonic combination. This may be of little importance as far as the methodology goes.' Surely you must concede that we store images of millions of thing...

Wheher you feel that 'phonics' or 'whole word' is the most appropriate strategy for teaching reading is reallyonly relevant where the initial teachig of reading is under discussion. It is less important when discussing a remedial approach for older children or for esl children. A child learns to rea...

You say "Yes, I think that eventually, everyone memorizes the words as we become more skilled and faster at reading. With beginners though, who are children, memorizing the words for the first time is a daunting task" I am not convinced that memorising words is a daunting task for children unless th...

I won’t be providing links – I really do not want to travel down such a well travelled road to prove things that seem self-evident to me. You may be right – it may be that I am asking my questions in the wrong place.

My best wishes.

No. I haven't made it up. If you Google up the words Sight Vocabulary I’m sure you will find a great many references and descriptions. I apologise. I had thught that anyone contributing to a forum on Applied Linguistics would be familiar with the term. We have a part of memory called Visual Memory w...

I have problems with the idea of ‘memorising lots of words becomes unnecessary’ Normally endowed people memorise the sight of words automatically without conscious effort – we just can’t avoid it. The research generally agrees that our sight vocabularies have a capacity of about 4000 discrete words....

The focus of my interest is not in the initial teaching of reading but in the remediation of reading difficulty among children aged 10 or over and in particular, to children in this age group for whom English is a second language. Interestingly, most people regard the idea of proactively priming sig...

It is relatively simple to demonstrate that competent, fluent reading skill is the consequence of an effective sight vocabulary which normally contains about three quarters of the words we encounter in reading and include a range of appropriate references for decoding lower frequency words. A non-sp...