Sight word recognition is an essential reading skill for beginning readers. When a child can read a word instantly without hesitation, it can be said that that word is a sight word for that child. The term sight word can refer to any word that is taught or must be learned by sight rather than through analysis of the parts (Cooper and Kiger, 2005). Sight words, also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to learn as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.

Sight words account for a large percentage of the words used in beginning children's print material. The advantage for children being able to recognize sight words automatically is that beginning readers will be able identify the majority of words in a beginning text before they even attempt to read it; therefore, allowing the child to concentrate on meaning and comprehension as they read without having to stop and decode every single word.

On the other hand, word lists are collections of words that must be part of the sight words of a chiled in a specific grade level. Unlike dictionaries that provide list of words of a child in a specific grade level. Unlike dictionaries that provide list of words and their definitions, word lists can be used as a tool for assessing a child's word recognition skill as well as basis for developing reading materials for specific grade levels. An example is the DolchBasic Sight Word (Dolch, 1942) which consists of 220 high-frequency words divided into lists from pre-primer to grade three. Another is Fry's Word List which is made up of 1000 of the most commonly used words in the English language.

The Philippines is a multilingual nation with more than 170 languages being spoken nationwide. With the implementation of the Mother Tongue Curriculum in grades K-3 which uses 19 Philippine Languages, there is perceived need to develop wordlists in these languages. This need is compounded by the fact that not much instructional materials in the mother tongues, as well tools assessing reading skills such as sight word recognition and fluency, have been developed yet for these pupils in the primary grade.