I agree with much of the article but all of us use some “sight word” methods. There, their, and they’re are all sounded out about the same but we use a whole word approach to ID the meaning.
I tutor kids. Last year I had a little girl, first-grader, who told me, “I am not the smartest kid in my class.” Broke my heart!! Why? Because she was not reading fluently yet! She had to memorize lists of sight words the entire year - rows and rows of words! By sight! It was guaranteed to kill any delight that kid would ever have in reading.
I am a strong believer in phonics, and I taught her to sound out the words, much as we could. Granted, English is not very phonetic, compared to Spanish, for instance. But still, letters have sounds, and giving kids the tools to sound out words opens the entire world of reading to them. Why oh why do they make them memorize pages and pages of sight words?
She rose to the challenge and got every word right on the end-of-year ALL sight-words test, by the way. And I spent a lot of time helping her to see the joy of reading. But what a waste of time.