Dyslexia and Sight Words

[goldenecho]

I want to hear the good, bad, and ugly about sight words and a dyslexic child.   Did you teach them, or avoid teaching sight words and just focus on phonics?   When and how did you teach them if you chose to?   Do you think it was helpful or harmful (or do you think there are ways to teach sight words that are helpful or harmful to a dyslexic child).  

 

[PeterPan]

There are almost no sight words as the ps defines them. The majority of words are completely decodable when reading is taught correctly (with all the phonograms and rules). So ideally you're using an OG-derived program that will teach those phonograms and rules, relying *exceptionally little* on sight words. Barton has some words they teach as sight words, but reality is the majority of them are also decodable. I never taught them as memorization but taught the phonograms completely upfront to make them decodable. 

What is sometimes thought of as sight words is actually *fluency*. Developing fluency and automaticity is important. RAN/RAS is an important piece in that. RAN/RAS is measured on the CTOPP (test of phonological processing) and is typically weak in dyslexics, even remediated dsylexics. Strong RAN/RAS is HIGHLY correlated with strong readers and it's one of the EASIEST things we can do to help our dyslexics. Working on RAN/RAS will make fluency work easier. 

So again, why sight words? They're a temporary stage for some learners in some curriculum, but in general you want everything to be decodable and you want to be working on fluency and automaticity.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4rcl6f0uo70esmv/AAAaGAHw3_YTMEQZSw_WI-t_a?dl=0  This should be the link to my RAN/RAS dropbox files.

[ElizabethB]

How and why to teach them with phonics:

Overview:

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/sightwords.html

Document:

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/Resources/Sight Words by Sound1.pdf

With my dyslexic students that have learned a lot of them as wholes, it only exacerbates their problems and makes them more likely to guess, I have to do a lot more nonsense words with them, taking up valuable instructional time that could be used more productively.