High Frequency Words

High frequency words are the bank of words that are most frequently spoken and written by young children in their first few years of schooling. They will depend on many factors such as geographic location, gender, culture and experience, and change according to place and over time. The automatic recognition and reading of a large bank of words reduces the cognitive load of decoding for young students when reading longer texts, and make space for making meaning. There is often a confusion in teachers’ minds between high frequency words and ‘sight’ words. Whereas ‘sight’ words are those which cannot be easily sounded out, such as ‘was’ and ‘they’, high frequency words need to be broken down into their component parts, such as syllables, onset-rime, and smaller digraphs, to assist with memorisation so that they can be automatically recalled.