Consider teaching little words as syllables for the adult student

Most of my adult literacy students had not problem with learning "little" words. They saw it as a foundation for learning bigger words.

But one student in particular already knew a lot of sight words, and didn't make the connection of it being a building block. I think it would have helped if she had thought of them as syllables.

So that might be an approach if you are having a similar situation.

An idea may be to use some of the sight words that the student already knows, and break those down into syllables.

Then you can ask your student if they recognize any of them as being words by themselves; such as cat in the word category.

Cheryl Paton