Sight vocabulary

[eddie1]

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-specific reading difficulty is invariably a failure of the memory’s admittance mechanism rather than a failure of memory itself. Where short term memory function is poor, words encountered in a text-stream in reading are held in visual/auditory focus too briefly to secure admission into sight vocabulary which consequently, remains largely ineffective as a primary reading mechanism.

Where teachers take steps to prime a child’s sight vocabulary with examples of every grapheme/phoneme correspondence, the child acquires an intuitive, instantly accessible decoding reference facility which enables the decoding of all words and in particular the less familiar, lower frequency words. Where for example, a pupil’s sight vocabulary includes the high frequency words ‘talk’ and ‘walk’, that child experiences no difficulty in decoding the lower frequency words ‘chalk’ and ‘stalk’. The sight vocabulary of children with poor short term memory function has to be proactively primed so that it positively supports the child’s reading efforts if this type of reading difficulty is to be resolved.

Does anyone have a view on this?

[jotham]

It sounds like phonics to me, as opposed to whole-language learning. I tend to favor phonics, so I agree with the statement. Most of the American educational system, however, uses whole language. It is controversial though and there may be a reversing trend in the future.
http://www.sntp.net/education/look-see.htm

[Stephen Jones]

Links plwase, eddie 1.

[eddie1]

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 sight vocabulary as a ‘whole word’ approach. There is surely agreement that phonics is the reading code whether you subscribe to the ‘whole word’ or the’ synthetic phonics’ view of how reading should be taught. I think that the idea that you have to belong to one camp or the other is misleading and damaging.

I am quite convinced that in order to be able to read you have to be able to ‘crack’ the code but I believe that you can learn to crack the code either by being formally taught the grapheme/phoneme correspondences (phonics) or by learning them intuitively (whole word) and that some people learn it best one way and some the other. The idea that all children should be put in little boxes and taught one way whether it suits them or not is something I have difficulty with. When you learned the word ‘dog’ associated with a picture of a dog, you intuitively assimilated three of these correspondences. There are only 160 grapheme/phoneme correspondences in total and these can all be represented in about fifty words.

In the UK where Synthetic Phonics is currently in vogue, it is heresy to propose any remedial teaching method based on ‘whole words’ The fashion will change of course but in the meantime, an awful lot of young people graduate to secondary schools, less than functionally literate.

The idea of proactively priming sight vocabulary is one that I have only lately discovered. Such material as I have been able to discover, appears to have been focused on priming sight vocabulary with high frequency words and this has inevitably only been partially successful as far as remediation is concerned. What I have added is the idea of adding words which include examples of every one of the 160 grapheme/phoneme correspondences and this appears to make a vital difference.

[jotham]

I am quite convinced that in order to be able to read you have to be able to ‘crack’ the code but I believe that you can learn to crack the code either by being formally taught the grapheme/phoneme correspondences (phonics) or by learning them intuitively (whole word) and that some people learn it best one way and some the other.

I think that's why both systems are being taught. It is hoped that the students can crack the code, but it isn't a concern of whole-language advocates. Most children catch on and can crack the code themselves when taught whole language, or else they memorize all the words by rote. Unfortunately too many children don't crack the code quite so easily and aren't good at memorizing. Phonics ensures that the number of children who don't know the code is much lower so that memorization of lots of words becomes unnecessary.

[JuanTwoThree]

I'd be interested to know something about the difference between attempting the pronunciation of an unknown word seen in written form and making the link between the written form and the known spoken form.

One is successfully pronouncing "chalk" or "caulk" correctly: by analogy with "walk" and "talk", and "taut", perhaps in order to ask what the word means.

Another is knowing the sound "chork" as the soft white writing material but failing to recognise the word "chalk".

(I knew from tv and films at age six or seven that there was a rank /kernel/. I also knew from reading that some important soldiers were called "Colonel". I didn't make the connection for some time)

[eddie1]

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. That the sight vocabulary of many children with reading problems is almost empty is something that any teacher can test for themselves. My question is why are they empty?

Dyslexia comes in many quite complex forms which have in common, the fact that they are very difficult to resolve but the majority of poor readers are not dyslexic. I believe they are just people with poor short term visual memory function who have consequential difficulty in forming a useful sight vocabulary. If this is the case, it is very readily remediable but first of all, there has to be some degree of acceptance that it is the case.

Personally, I define reading as ‘the retrieval and assimilation of the intellectual content of text’ and regard sight vocabulary as the primary vehicle for the ‘retrieval’ component of the process. We know that the act of reading involves the sub-vocalisation of the text and in order to sound it out either vocally or sub-vocally, we have to know the sounds the letters make!

On the question of 'the difference between attempting the pronunciation of an unknown word seen in written form and making the link between the written form and the known spoken form. ' This is a perfectly valid question but because I'm focused on older children with reading difficultes, I assume, reasonably I hope, that such children have very large receptive vocabularies (from vast quantities of TV watching if nothing else) They will 'know' many thousands of words they have never 'read' but as soon as they are able to vocalise them - the conection with the word which exists in their receptive vocabulary is made.

Your example of 'colonel' is a good one. Anyone who has internalised the full range of grapheme/phoneme correspondences would be able to vocalise this word accurately and make the correct link to its meaning.


Sorry – I cannot offer any useful links.

[Sally Olsen]

I wonder if you have heard of Irlen Syndrome. I have this syndrome myself and experienced the difficulties you describe in your students. Once I had been tested for the colour and had this colour on my glasses, I no longer had the difficulties. It seems that the problem is processing black letters on a white pages. If you don't process one or more of the colours in black you get distortions and thus, spend so much time trying to figure out the letters that your short term memory is exhausted and you can't read normally.

As you said, I used to sub-vocalize and then process the sound to figure out what was said on the page. Or I would read down the middle of the page and figure out what would come on the two ends just by experience.

I also studied with the Autoskills method on the computer and learned the sounds of the letters from overlearning. I find now that I can sounds out many of the longer unfamiliar words and want to do that. Before, I just passed over the word, learning its shape and making up an image for it - if it was the name of a person, I would make an image of that person (blakc hair, young, blue eyes, etc.) or if it was a place, I would imagine the scenery of that place and that is what would come to mind when I read along.

Of course, the disadvantage of that is that I couldn't discuss the book with anyone because I didn't know the names or places.

When learning a new language, I need a tape to hear the sounds and words over and over and to see them at the same time.

So I suppose that I agree that we need to teach both sight vocabulary within whole and meaningful texts and the sounds of the language in ways that they will overlearn, emphasizing whole methods so that students can use the ones that are most beneficial to them. [/i]

[Stephen Jones]

Sorry – I cannot offer any useful links.

So is this 'sight vocabulary' thing something you've completely made up or is the research on it top secret?

[eddie1]

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 where visual images are stored. This area of the brain is subdivided into specialised areas ie. one for faces, ete etc. There is an area where images of discrete words are stored and there has been a wealth of research into how many word-images can be stored there. This research has included the characters in Oriental languages and the average of the research suggests that about 4000 such images is the norm.

It seems pretty obvious even to me, that we remember many things we have seen and when these things are ‘text words’ we call them our sight vocabulary ie words we recognise instantly without the need for serial decoding. I believe that it is the existence of sight vocabulary that enables us to read with a level of fluency that would be very difficult to achieve if every word we encountered had to be decoded every time it was encountered and no matter how often it was encountered. But that is indeed, a personal belief based on decades of work as a teacher, headteacher, researcher and publisher in this field.

[Stephen Jones]

This is an ESL forum, not a elementary reading teaching forum. This is the first time I have come across the word. Google gives loads of links to reading software sites, but little to a basic explanation of what sight vocabulary is or what the theory behind it is.

But that is indeed, a personal belief based on decades of work as a teacher, headteacher, researcher and publisher in this field.

And these decades of work haven't produced a single link you can give us?

Glancing through a few google links it seems the idea was a basis of the 'whole words' or 'look and say' method. The research in favour of a phonemic method is overwhelming.

Obviously children read whole words; they master the pattern of the word and then recognize it without splitting it into component parts. We do the same when we learn a foreign script, such as the Arabic, Devanagari or Sinhalese script.

As far as reading disabilities go there are some interesting anecdotes. One concerned a girl in the UK in the 60s who went through school without being able to read or write and without anybody noticing. She simply remembered the word shapes as distinct entities, without realizing there is any pattern to them.

Then there was the student at my first secondary school who had been diagnozed as dyslexic. It turned out he's spent all of primary school reading from right to left, because no one had told him to put his finger on the page and follow the words.

[Stephen Jones]

The research generally agrees that our sight vocabularies have a capacity of about 4000 discrete words

Once again, can we have links to this research. It is much less generally known than you state.

[eddie1]

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.

[jotham]

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.

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; and phonics or the ability to decode words is a tool that they can use to understand many words they probably already know, and without a teacher's help. Through phonics, they can individually teach themselves and eventually memorize those words on their own just by reading.
Learning Korean as an adult, I'm somewhere in the middle: I've memorized a lot of words and that helps my speed, but I'm still at the pronounciation stage with maybe 35% of the words, because I haven't mastered them yet. But I can learn to read Korean much faster than I can Chinese, which has no or little pronunciation clues and causes me to spend more time. When our elementary students are learning whole language without any phonics help, some of them who never break the code on their own learn English like Chinese kids learn Chinese: one character at a time. I think English, like other pronunciation writing systems, has an obvious advantage for young learners, and we'd be amiss not to take advantage of it.

[eddie1]

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 they have some disability such as Irlen Syndrome or poor short term memory function. About 80% of children are competent readers by the age of 7 whether they have been formally taught phonics or not.

My focus is on those who have not. I would never suggest that any child is given lists of words to learn - that simply doesn't work. We already know why some children fail to acquire a significant sight vocabulty - Irlen Syndrome is one of these. When the cause is known, a remedy usually follows. That is certainly true for those with Irlen Syndrome. But it is not true for the much higher number of children whose difficulty lies in poor short term memory function.

I spent a couple of years in Korea myself and picked up the language quite readily. I also did some work in a small group of schools in Texas a few years ago, where many of the children were Hispanic and I used an approach which did not teach the phonic code yet the results greatly enhanced in the reading skills of most of the Hispanic children.

If you or anyone else out there currently teaches older children (9 - 16) for whom English is their second language, contact me off-forum and I will send you an approach to try. There will be no cost implications for you or anyone else other than myself. All I would ask is that you let me know how the experiment goes.

Eddie