Shifting the Balance by Jan Burkins

Author:Jan Burkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stenhouse Publishers
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Adapted from Adams (1990) and Carroll, Davies, and Richmond (1971)

This means that strategic effort helping readers store a few dozen high-frequency words in the word form area of the brain can free up a lot of working memory. Less attention spent on deciphering the words means students can direct more attention toward comprehending the text (Kilpatrick 2015; LaBerge and Samuels 1974).

MISUNDERSTANDING: 2

High-frequency words can’t be decoded.

It is common practice to describe high-frequency words as un-decodable, or irregular. But this isn’t completely true. Although it is true that some high-frequency words are less decodable, or rule-governed, than others, all words have some degree of decodability, even the most irregular ones (Adams 1990; Seidenberg 2017; Castles, Rastle, and Nation 2019). They all have some letters and/or letter strings that are familiar and predictable. Consider the following irregularly spelled high-frequency words. For each word, notice what is reliable about the sound spellings within it:

are, been, come, could, do, does, done, give, have, live, of, one, said, some, the, their, they, their, to, was, want, who, would, you

Also, most words considered to be irregular actually have patterns that are found in at least a few other words. So although they are irregular, or have exceptions to the rules, they are still somewhat consistent (Adams 1990; Seidenberg 2017; Moats and Tolman 2019). For example, learning the sound-to-spelling alignment, or mapping, of the word was can make it easier for children to learn want and wash. Learning the sound-to-symbol mapping for should can make it easier to learn would and could.

Furthermore, and of considerable importance, many high-frequency words are absolutely decodable, which makes their assignment to the flash card pile or the word wall unnecessary. Here are just a few examples of completely regular high-frequency words:

a, and, big, came, can, down, each, fast, get, how, in, like, make, not, play, read, see, stop, them, try, went, will, yes

Because so many high-frequency words are so regular, they may need little specialized instruction at all. So rather than teach these decodable high-frequency words (can, it, went) separately as sight words, we can make learning them even easier by teaching them in connection with our phonics lessons— teaching the word and alongside short a, in alongside short i, get alongside short e, and so on (Suggate 2016; Duke and Mesmer 2018).

But even high-frequency words that don’t completely follow rules and seem un-decodable have at least some decodability. In connected text especially, children can attempt to sound these words out, just like any word they don’t know. The probability of children successfully figuring out an irregularly spelled word by decoding it—and trying to “make the leap” from partial to full decoding with some assistance from meaning and context (set for variability)— tends to be higher than most other options, such as trying to find the word on a classroom word wall.

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