Pillar 5
Learning vocabulary while reading means turning new words into sightwords—words you recognise instantly. That happens when the shape of the word, its sound, and its meaning are linked through repeated encounters.
With ordinary English spelling, the sound is often unclear or missing, so learners may spend one or two minutes looking words up. This interrupts reading and can be very frustrating.
This lets you decode the sound of a new word yourself quickly and accurately. Doing this matters because the shape of the word and its sound make sense, and things that make sense are easier to remember.
Once you know the sound, you use the sentence to choose the right meaning. A word like star could mean a star in the night sky, a five-pointed shape, a film celebrity, or several other meanings. A sentence about movies points to “film star,” while one about the night sky points to the celestial meaning.
If you are using the eReader, you can tap on a word to hear it pronounced slowly and clearly, and see a precise translation in your native language. Each time you decode the sound, learn the meaning, and reread the sentence, the word sticks faster and becomes a sightword. As your bank of sightwords grows, reading becomes faster, easier, and comprehension improves with less effort.
Comprehension improves when reading is fluent. Fluency means reading at about the speed we speak. To be fluent, you need many sightwords—words you recognise instantly. The more sightwords you have, the faster you read, and the more you comprehend.
With ordinary English spelling, this process is slow. In our analysis of more than 20,000 words, only about 25% are pronounced as spelled. Because the spelling and sound don’t match, it can take many repetitions (e.g., 20–50) before a new word becomes a sightword. That makes fluent reading hard and limits comprehension.
When you decode the sound from the word in
This short cycle—decode the sound → remember it → infer the meaning or get it with a click → reread the sentence—turns new words into sightwords much faster. As your bank of sightwords grows, you reach fluency sooner. And when you read fluently, you naturally understand more, with less effort.
If you don’t know the meaning of a word when you are reading a document in the eReader, you can click on the word, hear the word pronounced, see the word translated into your native language and see what type of word it is.
The word “information” in an eReader document has been clicked on, showing a speaker to hear “information” pronounced, the word “pronunciation” translated into Japanese, and the Part of Speech, a noun.