Phonics and Sight Words: Two Building Blocks of Reading

Reading is a key skill and a necessary component of learning other subject matters. Ensuring that your child learns to read is one of the most important things you can do as a parent to prepare them for their future. Of course, your own knowledge of how the process of reading works has a bearing on how well you can instruct your child in the mechanics of language and reading. You’ll need to have a basic understanding of phonics, sight words, word analysis and phonemic awareness.

Broken down to its basic element, each word is composed of letters. By themselves or in combination, these letters represent the sounds of spoken language. From a very young age, children make associations between the letters and the sounds to which they correspond. This fundamental of reading is called alphabetic, which is taught through the techniques of phonemic awareness, word analysis, phonics, and sight words.

Phonemic awareness relates to a reader’s ability to listen to spoken language and identify the phonemes; these are the basic sounds of spoken language – English has about 40. Phonemes are combined to make syllables and words. The letters which correspond to these phonemes are known as graphemes.  Understanding these phonemes and graphemes is one of the building blocks of the reading process.

Another element in the learning process is word analysis, which can be described as phonics with an emphasis on the phoneme-grapheme pairs. Keep in mind that English does contain words which do not fit the usual patterns; there are also multiple grapheme/phoneme pairs depending on context.

This is when sight words come into play. Phonics and sight words are typically taught in conjunction. Sight words are those which children should be taught to recognize, read and speak instantly. These are words that appear in the highest frequency in English text, many of which are phonetically irregular. Mastering these words is one another fundamental step in a child’s journey towards literacy.

Lists of sight words were developed after exhaustive research into the mechanics of reading first by Edward B. Fry and later by Edward W. Dolch (both PhDs). Reading becomes much easier for the young reader once these sight words have been memorized. Such words comprise more than half of the text of a typical book or newspaper; and, even a higher frequency of text intended for beginner readers.

The best way to teach phonics is in conjunction with sight word recognition. There are a number of different phonics instruction techniques, each having their own advantages. Analytic phonics aims to teach children to identify a word and then move on to the grapheme/phoneme relationship. This method is especially effective when the child has already memorized the common sight words.

Phonics in spelling focuses on using the sounds of letters and graphemes to write words. Analogy phonics helps children identify and form words by using words they already know. Contextual phonics teaches children to learn the meanings of words from their context within a paragraph or sentence. All of these methods work best after the child has mastered sight words.

Reading requires an understanding of how letters and sounds correspond and of course, the meanings of words. Phonemic awareness, word analysis, phonics and sight words prepare children to decipher the mechanics of written language, and paves the way for the road to reading.