The words

Tap any word to hear it. 12 of these 13 words are in the app, where each has its own sentence.

The thirteen commonest words in school texts 13

Johns and Wilke, writing in the Texas Journal of Literacy Education, report that these thirteen words account for roughly 25 percent of the words in school texts and in adult reading material. Every one of them is on both the Dolch and the Fry lists.

What high-frequency words are

The University of Florida Literacy Institute defines high-frequency words as a small group of roughly 300 to 500 words that account for a large percentage of the words in print, which can be regular or irregular, and names Dolch and Fry as the two standard lists. The number is small and the payoff is large. Johns and Wilke report that thirteen words alone make up about a quarter of the words in school texts, and that a list of 100 to 200 covers more than half. The term sight word means something slightly different: a word a reader recognizes instantly. Eventually every word a fluent adult reads is a sight word.

Five minutes a day at home

Find out which words are missing before teaching any of them. Read a list aloud with your child and mark only the words that come slowly or wrong. Take three to five of those, show each card, say the word, have your child repeat it, spell it aloud, then say the whole word again. Shuffle and repeat until each returns in about a second. Open the next session with those words before adding more, and keep everything learned in one stack for a quick reread. Then put the new words into a short phrase, because a word known on a card but not in a sentence is only half learned.

How this fits with phonics

The Texas Education Agency, publishing its own high-frequency word list, warns teachers against describing these words as non-decodable or irregular as a group, because many contain very common spelling patterns, and says that even in a word like was it is worth pointing out the parts that do behave. The federal What Works Clearinghouse guide takes the same line, asking teachers to teach regular high-frequency words by applying letter sounds and to reserve whole-word teaching for the genuine exceptions. So the list is a priority order for practice, not an instruction to memorize. Phonics does the teaching; the list decides what gets the repetitions.

Practice tips

  • Test before you teach. Most children already know more of the list than a parent expects, and drilling known words wastes the five minutes.
  • Point out the parts of a word that do follow the rules, even in an awkward word like was or said.
  • Three to five words per session, judged learned at about one second, with the previous set reread first.
  • Put every newly learned word into a short spoken phrase, then a written one.
  • If school uses one list, use that list. Dolch and Fry overlap heavily and running both doubles the work.

Related lists

  • Dolch sight words: The Dolch list is 220 service words in five levels, plus a separate list of 95 nouns, so 315 words in total.
  • Fry sight words: Edward Fry's Instant Words are 1,000 words ranked by how often they appear in print, taught in hundreds.
  • Heart words: A heart word is a common word with one or two letters that do not follow the usual letter sound patterns, so those letters are learned by heart while the rest of the word is sounded out.

Sources