Sight words are important words that readers should recognize instantly, making up 50 to 75 percent of all words children may encounter. Dolch and Fry lists help identify these words, with the top ten words being the, to, he, you, en, of, in, is, and that.
“Sightwords” is the term for words that readers should recognize instantly. Recognition is important because sight words are used so frequently, making up, by some estimates, 50 to 75 percent of all words children may encounter. It’s also important because many of them don’t sound like they’re written, making them difficult to fathom using knowledge of phonetics. Having sight words within one’s repertoire gives the child a better chance of grappling with more difficult and infrequent words without losing the sense of what is being read.
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 Dolch List of Basic Sight Words and Fry’s 300 Instant Sight Words. Both lists are available on the National Literacy Institute website.
The Dolch List, by EW Dolch, includes 220 words in decreasing order of frequency representing the proportion of our language cited above. The top ten Dolch list words published in Locating and Correcting Reading Difficulties by J. Shanker and E. Ekwall in 1998 are:
the
to
he
to
THE
you
en
of
in
Fry’s Instant Words is actually a list by EB Fry, JE Kress and DL Fountoukidis and was published in The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists, Third Edition in 3. The list is divided into hundreds and is in order of frequency (although it is reordered alphabetically in some republications). the Fry List gives the top ten words as:
the
of
to
to
in
is
you
That
en
You can see that in both cases the description of the sight words is appropriate and that children would benefit from being able to read these words easily.
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