Reading words of increasing difficulty until they become unable to read or understand the words presented to them. Difficulty is manipulated by using words that have more letters or syllables, are less common and have more complicated spelling–sound relationships.

Definition

There are two types of sight words. The first type includes decodable words that frequently occur in printed English (e.g., “and,” “like,” “get”). These high frequencywords can be read by sounding them out, but they appear so often in text that learning to read them on sight will increase children’s reading fluency (Joseph, Nation, & Liversedge, 2013). Moreover, these words can provide a student access to connected text in advance of learning the phonics principles otherwise necessary for decoding them (Ehri, 2014).

The other type of sight words cannot be decoded because they do not follow the typical letter-sound correspondences (e.g., “have,” “there,” “of”). These are irregular words and because they cannot be identified, they must be recognized automatically.