[senco-forum] Reading and phonics

Maggie Downie

I can only respond to questions - not statements of dogma.

You don't like the term 'sight word' Fine I have never used it personally.  I do use the term 'sight vocabulary' and I mean by this those words which were assimilated into and are stored in the visual memory as discrete visual images much in the same way that we have stored images of millions of objects such as 'spoon' 'baby' 'door' etc and that on seeing one of these objects - we recognise it without concatenating its parts.

I was once told by someone (it may even have been yourself but it may not) that observations of eye-movements in reading showed that words were scanned into memory one letter at a time and that this proved that there were no words stored in visual memory as discrete wholes..

I responded by saying that I have a word list in my computer with 80,000 individual entries - they are there because I typed each one in myself and I can take them out and look at them any time. When a word is retrieved from the database, it is also (like sight retrieval) carried out serially one letter at a time. This letter by letter retrieval mechanism would appear to prove that these words don't exist in my database as discrete wholes yet they self-evidently do.

This response is for the benefit of others whose minds are still open to ideas which are contrary to their existing beliefs.

I, like many if not most teachers in this field, do indeed believe in the existence of sight vocabulary as I have defined it and recognise its primary role in the reading process.

Eddie C.