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…

Discusses research on early reading as it relates to the phonics versus "look and say" controversy. Considers the courses of action available to parents and teachers which take the findings into account. (RJC)

Comparison of 80 beginning first graders, half receiving phonics instruction and half receiving whole word instruction, found, for both groups, those above grade level in reading excelled in phonological recoding and application of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules while those below grade level applied visual-orthographic knowledge more than…

This study compared the effectiveness of reading instruction at the onset-rime level, phoneme level, and whole word level with 48 first graders. Both phoneme and onset-rime groups were significantly more accurate than whole word groups, and there was a tendency for the onset-rime group to outperform all other groups. (Author/DB)

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)

Examines the notion that words are sometimes perceived with greater ease than letters and that word shape sometimes plays a role in the perception of words. The data collected from 40 Israeli kindergarteners revealed that beginning readers found it easier to identify single letters than whole words, thus refuting the above notion. (Author/AS)