”Sight words” is the term for words that readers should recognize instantly. Recognition is important because sight words are so frequently used—making up, by some estimates, 50 to 75 percent of all words that children are likely to encounter. It is also important because many of them do not sound as they are spelled, making them difficult to sound out using knowledge of phonics. Having the sight words within his or her repertoire gives the child a better chance to grapple with more difficult and infrequent words without losing the sense of what is being read.
The sight words include commonly used words—words that are ubiquitous and important to understanding. Two lists that help educators and parents identify these words and give them the attention they deserve are the Dolch List of Basic Sight Words and Fry’s 300 Instant Sight Words. Both lists are available on the National Institute for Literacy website.
The Dolch List, by E. W. Dolch, includes 220 words in decreasing order of frequency that account for the proportion of our language quoted above. The top ten words from the Dolch list as published in Locating and correcting reading difficulties by J. Shanker and E. Ekwall in 1998 are:
the
to
and
he
a
I
you
it
of
in
Fry’s Instant Words is actually a list by E. B. Fry, J. E. Kress, and D. L. Fountoukidis and was published in The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists, 3rd edition in 1993. The list is divided into hundreds and is in frequency order (although it is reordered alphabetically in some republications). the Fry List gives the top ten words as:
the
of
and
a
to
in
is
you
that
it
You can see that in both cases the description of sight words is apt, and that children would benefit by being able to read these words easily.