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• They have mastered only a few phoneme-to-letter relationships.
• They’re not adept at applying any strategies for decoding words.
• Their modest repertoire of sight words, in combination with the other limitations, results
in frequent frustration and, therefore, fewer attempts to read.

Measurement

Conducting frequent formal and informal assessments of your students’ reading characteristics will
inform your decisions about what to emphasize, as well as with whom. If you fail to recognize the
needs of your frustrated readers, there is a strong possibility that their future reading habits will
continue to diverge—in a bad way—from the healthy reading attitudes and habits of your happy
readers.

Assessing a student’s facility with sight words is one common way to check on reading progress.
There are several prepared lists of sight words, the Dolch list being one of the more popular.
University of Illinois researcher E. W. Dolch assembled this list, which is divided by grade level.
Here’s a sample:

Dolch List: First Grade Dolch List: Second Grade
after does

lot gave

once those
take their

walk upon

These lists can be used to guide assessments of students’ sight-word abilities and can be used
throughout the school year.

Common Errors

At the outset of their careers as readers, young students may make a variety of mistakes, such as
confusing the letters b and d or s and z. Other problems include skipping words, confusing "the" and
"a," using pictures to decode a word, and guessing the word based on its first letter.

Early on, a young reader’s fluency level will be such that they read word by word, and they will usually
recognize mistakes in their own reading. As an instructor, it can be useful to help them formulate
questions about what they’re reading. For example:

Student: “When the sun set, the house grew bark.”

Teacher: “Does that make sense? ‘The house grew bark?’”

Student: “No—houses don’t grow bark.”

Teacher: “Let’s look at that sentence again.”