Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15: 549–574, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 549 The efficacy of ‘whole word’ versus ‘analytic’ reading instruction for children with Down syndrome LINDA CUPPLES 1 & TERESA IACONO 2 1 Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; 2 Centre for Developmental Disability Health Victoria, Melbourne, Australia Abstract. An intervention study was conducted to investigate whether children with Down syndrome (DS) would benefit from an ‘analytic’ approach to reading instruction, which encompassed explicit training in phonological awareness. Participants were seven English- speaking children with DS aged 8;6 (years;months) to 11;1, who demonstrated little or no nonword-reading ability prior to intervention. The children received weekly instruction (for six weeks) in reading aloud 30 regularly spelt monosyllables (e.g., ten, bake) using an ‘analytic’ approach, in which words were learned by combining onsets with rimes (four children), or a ‘whole-word’ approach (three children). Participants’ oral reading was assessed pre- and post-intervention using a reading test comprising the 30 trained words and 30 untrained (generalisation) words. Most children (six out of seven) read more training words correctly after intervention than before, with significant improvement shown by four children (two trained analytically, and two trained with whole words). More importantly, reading of general- isation words improved significantly in only three children, all of whom had received analytic training. It was concluded that children with DS benefit from an analytic approach to reading instruction, even though their auditory-verbal memory (assessed using digit span) is poor. Key words: Down syndrome, Intellectual disability, Intervention, Phonological awareness, Reading instruction Introduction Down syndrome (DS) is a genetic abnormality, which usually results from the presence of an extra chromosome 21 (trisomy 21) (Rogers, Roizen & Capone 1996). It is associated with intellectual disability of varying severity, although Rogers et al. reported typical intelligence quotients as ranging from 40 to 55. As a result of their intellectual disability and concomitant language prob- lems (Miller 1987), children with DS are at risk of problems in learning to read. Like other children with intellectual disability, they have generally been taught to read using a ‘sight word’ approach, in which they learn to associate whole printed words with their spoken forms (Farrell & Elkins 1995). In the mid-1980s, Buckley recommended the use of such an approach for children with DS on two grounds. First, a sight word approach had already proven successful for teaching reading skills to individuals with DS; and second,