This study aimed to investigate the effect of explicit sight word instruction on reading speed of elementary EFL students. Sight words are generally well-defined as those words that are not decodable by Ordinary English phonics instructions and that appear often in text (Hood, 1977). These words are found in 50-70% of written texts (Harris & Sipay, 1975). Additionally, all three theoretic methods to reading instruction—synthetic (Chall, 1970), authentic (Goodman, 1986) and interactive (Rumelhart, 1994)—obviously address the significance of inserting sight word in reading instruction. Although many learners are able to recognize words accurately, they spend extreme time and energy in the process of word recognition, which may lead to a breakdown of comprehension. …show more content…
A word recognition ability such as the explicit instruction of sight words maybe used by students who are facing problems in reading to increase their reading capacity (Alexander & Heathington (1988). Frantantoni (1999) mentioned that as good readers have a large sight word, they are different from poor readers. A largely familiar problem faced by learners through the ESL/EFL world is that of slow reading (Hamp-Lyons 1983; Cooper 1984). Logically, students all differ in their capacity to process and quickly name words. Though, this speed can depend on the amount and quality of exposures to the words (Rasinski, Blachowicz et al. 2012). Fluent students focus their time and attention on comprehension tasks and make connections between the ideas in the text and their background knowledge, whereas non-fluent students spend greatly their time and attention on decoding particular words (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). The larger collection of sight words a reader has, the more quickly and fluently a student can read material (Burns, Roe at al.