Putting a spin on reading: The language of the Rose Review

The Rose Review, a so-called Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, was published by the British Government's Department for Education and Skills in March 2006, as a result of criticism from Members of Parliament and others, and dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the National Literacy Strategy in England. For reasons that are unclear, the remedy that the Review proposed, now adopted by Government, was the wholesale imposition on teachers of a narrow and reductionist approach to reading called `synthetic phonics'. Knowing the controversial nature of this approach, which has very dubious research backing, and faced with almost universal opposition to it, the Review needed to argue its case very persuasively indeed. This it did by making considerable use of the readily available and politically-inspired techniques of spin doctoring. In this article I analyse the language of the Review in an endeavour to illustrate how this was done.