The Power of Phonics
Whole language proponents have claimed for years that a phonics approach to learning how to read is counter-productive. They claim it is easier to learn to read whole words than learning how to sound out the letters in words. One of the common strategies in the whole language method is to emphasize the memorization of sight words, the Dolch Sight Word List being the most famous. This list contains many words that use very common letter-sound patterns, such as “and”, “big”, and “can”, but also some that have very uncommon patterns such as “of”, “two”, and “eight.”
Here is what Frank Smith, one of the gurus of the Whole Language movement claimed:
“It is easier for a reader to remember the unique appearance and pronunciation of a whole word like ‘photograph’ than to remember the unique pronunciations of meaningless syllables and spelling units”
— Smith, F. (1985). Reading without nonsense: Making sense of reading. p.146; New York: Teachers College Press.
Oh, yeah? Try it for yourself! Click on the button below to experience what it’s like to be illiterate and see if you’d like to memorize such a list.
Dolch Sight Word List
The table below contains the 218 words of the well-known Dolch Sight Word List. This list has about 106 different spelling patterns or GPCs (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences). When you click the "Make me illiterate" button below the words are displayed in a font that you probably can‘t read. But the “illiterate view” contains the exact same letters and words that are used in the “Literate View”. So, is it easier to remember the unique appearance and pronunciation of a whole word like “photograph” or do you think it would be easier to learn how to pronounce the 106 different spelling patterns that are used in the Dolch Sight Word List?
If a child memorized all of these words it would end up being able to read … well, at least these 218 words. If a child would be taught to read and sound out words using the very same 106 spelling patterns in this list, it would be able to decode almost 14,000 words.
If a child would be taught to read using the 106 most common spelling patterns in English it would be able to decode more than 32,500 English words! See the charts below the table.
| Preprimer | Primer | First | Second | Third |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | all | after | always | about |
| and | am | again | around | better |
| away | are | an | because | bring |
| big | at | any | been | carry |
| blue | ate | as | before | clean |
| can | be | ask | best | cut |
| come | black | by | both | done |
| down | brown | could | buy | draw |
| find | but | every | call | drink |
| for | came | fly | cold | eight |
| funny | did | from | does | fall |
| go | do | give | don’t | far |
| help | eat | going | fast | full |
| hers | four | had | first | got |
| I | get | has | five | grow |
| in | good | her | found | hold |
| is | has | him | gave | hot |
| it | he | how | goes | hurt |
| jump | into | just | green | if |
| little | like | know | its | keep |
| look | must | let | made | kind |
| make | new | live | many | laugh |
| me | no | may | off | light |
| my | now | of | or | long |
| not | on | old | pull | much |
| one | our | once | read | myself |
| play | out | open | right | never |
| red | please | over | sing | only |
| run | pretty | put | sit | own |
| said | ran | round | sleep | pick |
| see | ride | some | tell | seven |
| the | saw | stop | their | shall |
| three | say | take | these | show |
| to | she | thank | those | six |
| two | so | them | upon | small |
| up | soon | then | us | start |
| we | that | think | use | ten |
| yellow | there | walk | very | today |
| you | they | where | wash | together |
| this | when | which | try | |
| too | why | warm | ||
| under | wish | |||
| want | work | |||
| was | would | |||
| well | write | |||
| went | your | |||
| what | ||||
| white | ||||
| who | ||||
| will | ||||
| with | ||||
| yes |
What is a Productivity Sequence?
A productivity sequence is produced as follows: start with one or two very common GPCs (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences), such as “s_s” and “i_i”; then check these 2 with each one of all the remaining GPCs against all of the words in a list to discover which GPC produces the most new words with 3 GPCs. Add that GPC to the “s_s”, “i_i” sequence. Now you have the first 3 most productive letters. Repeat the process to discover the next most productive letter and add that to the sequence. Repeat this process until you’ve finished all of the letters. That is the productivity sequence.
Here is the productivity sequence chart for the Dolch Sight Words. It uses only the 106 spelling patterns found in the Dolch Sight Word List
and has searched through a list of more than 40,000 words to find those words that contain only the spelling patterns found in this list.
Here is a productivity chart using all of the 444 GPCs from a larger corpus of almost 42,000 words.
