Tips for Teaching High-Frequency Words
By Christina Quarelli, Senior Curriculum Specialist
You may have heard the terms sight words or high-frequency words, but what’s the difference? And where do these words fit in when it comes to becoming a fluent, real-world reader?
Let’s dive into high-frequency word instruction and how that contributes to automaticity & fluency.
What are High-Frequency Words?
High-frequency words are the most common words used in the English language. Because of this, when students can immediately identify these words, they’ll be more fluent and their comprehension is more likely to naturally improve. The ultimate goal? For most words to become an instantly recognizable sight word.
Teachers have known this, so traditional logic would say that students would best learn these words using rote memorization activities such as flash cards. But if most literate adults know tens of thousands of words immediately upon sight… did they need to memorize them all first? Of course not!
How Should We Teach High-Frequency Words?
Memorizing words doesn’t work to help students internalize their learning. And it’s unnecessary — most irregular words are mostly decodable, containing only one or two letters that don’t conform to their usual letter-sound correspondence. So what’s the better option?
It’s important to understand that there’s a complex process that happens in the brain that takes an unfamiliar printed word and makes it immediately recognizable by sight. We call this orthographic mapping.
What people don’t realize is that although it’s done very quickly, research shows that readers still process every single letter from left to right. We simply don’t realize we’re doing it.
So, how can we ensure our students get to this point? For them to effortlessly recognize a word and immediately retrieve it, they need to have:
- Phonological long-term memory
- Phonemic awareness & analysis
- Letter-sound skills
Which means those memorization activities are actually counter-intuitive.
The best way to build up word banks that they will know automatically and permanently? Leverage sound-by-sound blending and decoding first.
Heart Words
When a word is mostly decodable, but maybe they haven’t learned a specific sound-spelling yet or there’s a permanently-irregular sound, we can call these “heart words.”
A corresponding teaching strategy called “heart-mapping” guides students to only know the tricky part “by heart.”
As students are doing that sound-by-sound blending, consider using symbols within sound boxes for both decodable and irregular sounds so students can distinguish between the two in a visually engaging way.
But now? They have a strategy in their reader’s toolkit based on brain science! And knowing just the “hard part by heart”? That’s a much easier lift for our young readers.
Decoding and heart mapping for high-frequency word instruction can help you foster fluent, real-world readers.
Take best practice and make it your practice, today!
Find more tips from Christina on translating education research to practice in this video series:
Christina Quarelli is a K-5 Curriculum Specialist at McGraw Hill. Christina, a former K–8 teacher of 18 years, holds a Master of Education degree in Educational Counseling and has worked as both a teacher mentor and instructional coach focusing on best practices for engagement and maximizing learner potential. Christina resides in Phoenix, Arizona.
