People use many terms when talking about irregular words: high-frequency words, sight words, and trick words. In order to know how best to help students with these words, let’s first clarify the terms.
High-frequency Words
High-frequency words are the words most commonly found in the English language. Most people use the Dolch or Fry lists when teaching these words. These words can be regular, like “big” or irregular like “look”.
Sight Words
Sight words are words that students can read by sight (without sounding out). All regular and irregular words are technically sight words once they are learned. Many people interchange the terms high-frequency words and sight words, but they have different meanings. Good readers only need 1-5 exposures to new words in order to learn them. Then, once learned, they don’t forget them. However, a struggling reader may need up to 30 exposures in order to remember the word.
Irregular Words
Irregular words are those words that are less predictable and often have tricky spellings. The pronunciation of some of these words has changed over the years, but the spellings have not. For example,” said” or “does” both have tricky letters where the phoneme (spoken sound) does not match the grapheme (written expression of that sound).
What are some research-backed ways to teach kids these words?
Predictable words: You can help students learn to read predictable words and irregular words by strengthening phonemic awareness, phoneme-grapheme mapping, and morphology skills. These words/ patterns should be learned through a systematic, structured literacy program like the Wilson Reading System.
Irregular words: These words are more difficult to learn for most students because some of the letter-sound relationships are not predictable. However, it is a myth that these words must be memorized by sight. Louise Spear-Swerling shared in her book, Structured Literacy Interventions that shorter words are often misspelled more often than longer words. If we learned by memorization, then shorter words should be the easiest. David Kilpatrick, Ph.D. also found, through his research, that students who are good at spelling predictable words will also be stronger at spelling irregular words. Below I will give some suggestions that you can use with your learners when working with irregular words.
Strategy 1: Group similar words
When teaching irregular words, group similar words together.
Examples:
similar beginning sounds, such as two, twice, twenty, twin or any, anyone, anything
similar ending rhymes such as their, heir, where
Similar spellings, but different sounds such as here and there
Strategy 2: Call attention to the odd part of the word.
When you call attention to the odd part of the word instead of having the student memorize the entire word, you are reducing the student’s mental load. This method is also effective because our brains don’t store words by some sort of visual memory. That is why drawing shape boxes around the sight words doesn't actually aid in remembering the word. Researchers have discovered that we store words through a process called orthographic mapping. Orthographic memory allows readers to remember a sequence of letters so well that they can read them instantly without sounding them out or guessing. Therefore, it is very important to teach your struggling readers to pay close attention to the phoneme-grapheme connection within the word. In many irregular words, there is only one tricky letter and the rest are decodable. Therefore, students can just focus on the one part that is irregular. The two methods below are easy ways to call attention to the odd or tricky part of the word.
Heart Word Method:
Many people use the heart word method to do this; a heart is placed above the letter(s) that are not making the predictable sound. This allows students to sound out the rest of the word and only memorize the tricky part.
Color-coding Method:
You can also color code the letters in a word.
Green= predictable letters
Red= trick letters
Yellow= letters that can have more than one sound, but there is a rule that helps to figure it out (example: s can say /s/ or /z/)
Strategy 3: Pronounce the word the way it looks.
I’m sure you have learned the spelling of some irregular words by pronouncing the word the way it looks. One of my students could not remember how to spell the irregular word, “does", even though we practiced it countless times using both the heart word method and the color-coding method. However, when we started pronouncing it /do/ /es/, instead of /d/ /u/ /z/ he could remember that. I would only use this method after the first two strategies don’t work.
Strategy 4: Use mnemonics.
When I was in high school, many students were misspelling the word principal. They wrote principle, instead of principal. My principal taught them that the principal is your pal. They never forgot the spelling after that. This strategy is especially helpful for homophones.
Strategy 5: Ask learners to pay close attention to the letter sequence.
First, have the learner trace the word.
Then, have them visualize each letter of the word in order while sky-writing. Students can pretend that their pointer and middle fingers can spray paint the word on the wall. They should hold their writing arms out straight while "spray painting". They should think of a color in their mind and pretend to spray paint the word on the wall while saying the letters aloud.
Strategy 6: Use Multi-sensory techniques.
Have students write words on a gel pad or in a pan of rice. Ensure that they are saying the letters as they write the word. Activating multiple parts of the brain when writing the word will help the student to commit it to memory.
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