Sight word

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Sight words (often also high-frequency words, dagger sight words, dagger 220, catchwords, etc.) are frequently used words that children should visually grasp as a whole when learning to read in order to recognize them in texts by themselves - without speaking aloud or referring to others Way to have to decode. Sight words historically replaced the whole-word method , which is not considered pedagogically feasible.

Sight words make up up to 75% of the words in texts for children to learn to read. The advantage for children of automatic recognition of these words is that they can be identified before they actually read. This allows children to concentrate on the meaning and meaning of the text without having to decode every single word. Theorists of the whole word method believe that mastering the largest possible number of such sight words greatly accelerates learning to read.

The method of learning complete words visually is particularly advantageous for words that are difficult to write, that do not conform to the rules for simple phoning, and that cannot be represented by images. A common example in German is the word "and".

Several lists of sight words have been published, including the so-called "dagger sight words" and the "magic 100 words". These lists are similar in that they group words according to the frequency with which they appear in beginner texts. Although these lists often overlap, there are differences in the perceived frequency of the words, as well as in the place and year of publication and the samples collected.

Sight words were criticized by Rudolf Flesch , among others , who considered the introduction of sight words in school lessons to be the cause of increasing illiteracy in the USA.

The term sight words is often confused with the visual cognition of words, sight vocabulary , the individual number of words a person can visually recognize without having to decode them.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Complex language. How children learn to read and write properly. In: SWR. Retrieved July 10, 2018 .