Why Learn High Frequency Words?
High frequency words (sight words) are words that students encounter frequently in reading and writing. It is critical that readers and writers develop automaticity (automatic recognition), a skill that leads to fluency. "Students need to be able to read the first 300 Instant Words "instantly" without a moment's hesitation, because these 300 words make up 65% of all written material" (Frye). Comprehension begins to break down when students are focused on trying to decode or sound out the words.
Some high frequency words do not follow regular phonetic rules. They do not follow easy spelling patterns (example: cave, Dave, save, wave, gave, have) As a result, these words are more difficult for students to master. Asking children to "sound it out" is pointless and generally causes increased frustration for most struggling readers. Beginning readers need to recognize these words as "sight words". "In order for students to retain a difficult word, they need many opportunities to experience and manipulate it (Throop).
Much of our language has been adapted from other languages during its development. One sixth of the words survived from old English and almost all of those words are high frequency words.
A prime example of the importance of high frequency words in a piece of text can be seen in counting the number of sight words appearing in a simple version of The Three Bears.
This term refers to
a.) Nonphonetic words - those needing to be recognized by sight because they can't be sounded out (e.g., was, through).
b.) Frequently occurring words - those needing to be recognized easily because they occur so often.
c.) High-interest words - those recognized by sight because they have special interest and/or emotional overtones for child (e.g., mom, dad, love, birthday, Christmas, dinosaur, etc.)
Connections
Sight words and context clues: students need to know enough words by sight in order to have enough context to help identify other words:
The went to the to and had a .
For the above sentence, it is more difficult to predict the words than in the following:
The child went to the to play and he had a .
Sight words and prior knowledge - already knowing the pronunciation and meaning of spoken words makes it easier to recognize and remember written words.
Importance of sight words for independent reading
¨ Enables use of context clues.
¨ Increases fluency and ease of reading
¨ Children can read greater amounts and for longer periods.
¨ Focus can be more on comprehension than on decoding.