Reconceptualizing the Development of Sight Word Reading and Its Relationship to Recoding

Many researchers and teachers have adopted a dual route view to explain how readers read words out of context. This view holds that words are read in one of two ways, either by phonological recoding or by sight. Phonological recoding involves translating letters into sounds by application of letter–sound rules and then recognizing the identities of words from their pronunciations. This chapter proposes an alternative conception of sight word reading that involves establishing systematic visual-phonological connections between the spellings of words and their pronunciations in memory. Readers use their knowledge about letter-sound relations to form these connections. Authorities differ in their views about the…