Most Thai classrooms grew up on word lists. The teacher hands out the words, the children learn them by heart, there's a spelling test, and that's the lesson. The phonics approach that has gained ground in recent years says you teach the sounds first, so a child can read a word nobody has taught them. So which one is right? The plain answer is that both are, but they do different jobs.
Phonics Is the Tool for Reading Words You Never Taught
A child with solid phonics meets a word like pond for the first time and simply reads it, with nobody there to tell them what it says. Memorising can never do that, because it only ever covers the words already on the list. English has hundreds of thousands of words. No child memorises fast enough to keep up. That is why phonics is the foundation you cannot skip.
Learning Words by Sight Still Earns Its Place
But English is full of words whose spelling refuses to follow the sounds: the, one, said, was. Sound those out and you get the wrong word, so a child has to know them on sight. Topic vocabulary like animal names and colours also goes in faster through repeated picture and word matching, and that is memorising too.
The split that actually works in Grades 1 to 3 is phonics as the weekly spine, with sight words and topic vocabulary woven in alongside it. Roughly seventy to thirty.
Signs You Have Tipped Too Far One Way
- A child recites hundreds of words but stalls completely on an easy word they've never seen: too much memorising, and no phonics underneath it.
- A child sounds out every single word, even the and was, and reads painfully slowly: phonics is being pushed past its limits, so add sight words.
- A child reads the words aloud but can't tell you what any of them mean: topic vocabulary is missing, so add picture and word matching worksheets.