Ideas for Teaching Sight Words to English Learners

Hi Everyone,

I recently received a question from an ESL teacher who asked:

"I’d like to get some ideas of how I can help students with sight words.  I can only make sight-word activities a minor part of a daily lesson since I have so much else to cover in my reading and writing class.  So I’m looking for add-on daily activities and then a way to incorporate it into the readings we do in our textbook.  The level is Upper Beginning ESL—they typically have a CASAS Reading score of around 200-216 with tests 083 and 084."

Any ideas that can help this instructor?

Thanks,

Steve Schmidt

Moderator, LINCS Reading and Writing CoP

Comments

this might sound like an activity for kids, but in my experience, adults also like to play bingo especially if there are "prizes" involved, I always bring chocolates and students love it. Bingo is a fun and quick game to play with any type of vocabulary. There are bingos with sight words, or you can create your own.  There are some websites like Teachers pay teachers, where you can find those type of things.  Hope this helps.

This is very elementary, but how about this:

- write a word in large print on a piece of paper (so all students can see the word)

- give each student a word

- have the students stand in a line or sit in a line with their word

- the student reads the word or does what the word says

Ex: sit, stand, handshake, up down, write, read, fist, phone, etc

You can also write a sentence and give each student one of the sentence words and they have put the sentence together, i.e. I can walk.

I did this as a conversation with my students last night and it took then a while to figure out the conversation, but i had them read the conversation out loud while listening. They were eventuall able to figure out the pieces.

Hello Steve and all, When it comes to teaching reading fundamentals, I have been on a steep learning curve for many years. One source that I have found helpful is Reading Rockets. This website targets teaching reading to children; however, there are useful concepts and methods that can also apply to teaching reading to adults.

I located this recent blogpost, "A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words" by  Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter, Tina Osenga, on the site which details how to approach teaching high frequency words that are also referred to as "sight words." According to this post, memorization may not be the best method to teach sight words.

Many "sight words" can be effectively taught by drawing learners' attention to common letter/sound patterns. The authors describe "Flash Words", i.e., words that are phonetically decoable and need to be identified "in a flash"  because of their frequency in  texts,  for example, did, not, can.. Flash words are in contrast to "Heart Words,",which are words that must be learned "by heart," rather than decoded-- although parts of a word might actually be docodable-- for example, saidarewhere.

I'd love to hear members' thoughts on this blogpost, as well as yours, Steve. What might be the pros and cons of the approach recommended in this article?

I'm looking forward to learning more about how to effectively teach sight words.  

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition and Teaching & Learning CoP

Hi Susan,

Thanks so much for sharing A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words from Reading Rockets!  Reading Rockets is geared toward teaching children, but much of their content is applicable for adult learning as well.

A main focus of the article is that teaching sight words in isolation is not a best practice.  I wholeheartedly agree!  Our brains are not geared toward learning discrete facts in isolation.  (Can I get some affirmation from adult education teachers whose students have not learned the multiplication tables?)  We learn so much more by learning in context.  The practice recommended in the article is to incorporate high frequency sight word instruction along with the teaching of phonics.  "Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words" (Farrell, Hunter, & Osenga, 2019).  This is an approach I had never seen before, but one that makes perfect sense.

Another thing that struck me in the article was using "ditties" to teach the,a, and of:

  • "The: I can say ‘thee’ or I can say ‘thuh’, but I always spell it ‘t’ ‘h’ ‘e’
  • A: I can say ‘ā’ or I can say ‘uh’, but I always spell it with the letter ‘a’
  • Of is hard to spell, but not for me. I love to spell of. ‘o’ ‘f’ of, ‘o’ ‘f’ of, ‘o’ ‘f’ of"

(Farrell, Hunter, & Osenga, 2019)

The ditties give learners something more for their brains to process instead of just, "remember this."  

Susan, many thanks again for finding and sharing this outstanding article!