Contrasting zones of comfortable competence: popular culture in a phonics lesson.
The reading instruction followed a literature-based approach in five of the classrooms and a systematic phonics approach in four classrooms.
Literacy is first defined as understanding and using the written and understanding phonics.
Lists of spelling words for memorization are not used nor are spelling or phonics workbooks.
If circumstance specificity produces the distributed characteristic in vocabulary, why not in phonics?
Four children were not included because they had insufficient standard phonics responses (less than 10%) to determine a meaningful point-biserial correlation.
Two of the literacy measures assessed phonics skills (word attack and letter-word identification), one assessed reading comprehension (passage comprehension), and two assessed writing (proofing, dictation).
Partisans of whole language tend to draw their support from functional linguists, whereas adherents of phonics get it from formalists.
