Although the recent publication of the Rose Report appears to draw a line in the sand that privileges synthetic phonics over other methods in the UK, history indicates a pendulum swing of preference between whole-word and phonics since the advent of mass education. Suggesting that the current "victory" for exponents of synthetic phonics…

Effects of 2 procedures (either whole word or phonetic-prompt) for error correction were compared during drills in sight word recognition of 5 students (ages 8 and 9) with developmental disabilities. Results from instruction, same-day tests, and next-day tests indicated that more words were learned in the whole word condition. (Author/DB)