So how do children turn a printed word into a sight word? Creating a sight word involves forming permanent connections between a word’s letters, its pronunciation, and its meaning in memory (Perfetti, 1992 Rack, Hulme, Snowling, & Wightman, 1994).
These units are stored in long-term memory. Our brains use what we know about letter-sound relationships plus our awareness of speech sounds to map letter patterns and words together as units. Research suggests that we scan every single letter of every word we read. How do students go from sounding out every printed word to knowing sight words? The process of storing a word permanently in memory for instant retrieval is called orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014, Kilpatrick, 2015).
Reading words without sounding them out means we have more time and resources to bring towards understanding what we read.
Words that you read instantly (Ehri, 1992) are called sight words. When you looked at the words on this page, chances are strong that you automatically and effortlessly read without sounding out each word.
