Synopsis: Making Sight Words (Murray,
2012)
Making
Sight Words focuses on the key task for beginners:
learning to read words. Most texts on teaching children to read lean heavily on
philosophical speculation rather than on reading research, and they recycle
failed practices from the past along with many empty fads of contemporary
practice.
This book tells the
exciting story emerging from reading research of how beginners can learn to
read words effortlessly and automatically, not by memorization, but by
understanding their alphabetic mappings. Teachers learn to guide beginners in
their journey from phoneme awareness to accurate, reliable decoding, and from
there to the effortless word recognition of fluent reading, which supports
reading comprehension. Making Sight Words
translates research into practical strategies to help children recognize new words
thoroughly, efficiently, and permanently.
Making Sight
Words features an unusual organization into expository chapters and
practical chapters. The twelve expository chapters deal with broad questions
about what to teach and why. The book introduces the unique discovery, promise,
and problems of alphabetic writing and explains a powerful theory for
understanding how children develop the ability to read words. After describing the
expertise of adult readers, it follows the course of reading development to develop
familiarity with the milestones of phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency,
vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies.
The nine practical chapters show students how to carry out the work
of effective reading teachers. They show how to motivate reading and support
word learning as children read aloud. Readers learn to teach phonics through an
engaging, hands-on technique developed at Auburn, the letterbox lesson. They
learn how to guide the development of reading fluency and how to teach spelling
as wordmapping, another homegrown Auburn technique. In addition, these chapters
include simple assessments to monitor children’s progress in learning to read.