Can Poor Decoders Be Good Sight-word Readers?
Word recognition skill is the foundation of the reading process. Word recognition can be accomplished by two major strategies: phonological decoding and sight-word reading, the latter being a marker for proficient reading. There is, however, a controversy regarding the relationship between decoding and sight-word reading, whether the two are independent or the latter is built on the foundations of the former. A related controversy about instructional strategy could be whether to use the whole-word method to improve word-recognition skills, or to first build decoding skills and then introduce sight-words. Five goals were set up to address these issues: 1) developing a criterion that can be used easily by classroom teachers to assess sight-word reading ability; 2) examining the relationship between decoding and sight-word reading; 3) identifying the mechanism that can explain the relationship; 4) examining factors that facilitate sight-word reading; and, 5) speculating on the instruction
