Whole language as signifier: Considering the semantic field of school literacy

Journal of Literacy Research, Mar 1998 by Dressman, Mark, McCarty, Laurie, Benson, Jonathan

The second point of significance Sherzer's approach has had for our analysis has to do with theorizing the context in which we collected our interview data. To support his argument, Sherzer presented transcripts of bargaining between buyers and sellers and of storytelling events, collected within naturalistic settings in which the researcher "merely recorded" the speech event as it occurred. We, however, were not privy to actual conversations among participants; instead, we were active participants in gathering our data through scheduled interviews in which responses were given to questions of our design. If we characterize our data as interview data in the past has implicitly been characterized, that is, as the objective representation of an interviewee's position on a particular matter, then an argument can be made that Sherzer's approach may not be the most appropriate frame for our analysis, because our data is not "natural." But that is not how we characterize our interview data. Instead, Sherzer's approach has made us aware of the performative nature of the interviews themselves and has led us to be cognizant in our analysis that each person we spoke to understood we were researchers from a university, that we were interviewing other "interested parties" on the topic of , that the interviewee's comments would be compared and contrasted with others, and that a summative document would be produced from this project which would bear the authority of university research and which would attempt to document (and so implicitly define) the meaning of in (and implicitly for) their community. In short, we have been made aware of the extent to which our project has not merely"sampled" the discourse about and literacy, but is inevitably also playing a role in producing it and the power relations that discourse enacts. The third point of significance that Sherzer's approach has for our project then, is that because discourse relies on the creative use of metaphors and other linguistic devices and categories of thought that apply to more than just the topic of conversation at hand, there is more at stake in any linguistic exchange than speakers often claim. Just as in Sherzer's examples of bargaining or storytelling, where the use of particular turns of phrase may not only denote an object but connote its value and the relative social position of buyer and seller or of teller and listener, when interviewees in our study or the authors of professional and commercial periodicals characterized as an "act of faith" or used Yiddish exclamations to voice their opinions, they were extending the meaning of the controversy surrounding to other realms of cultural, historical controversy, and in doing so were implicitly demonstrating that was about much more to them than "best/better ways" to teach, and for children to learn, literacy

The product of such an analysis has become a complex "web" or field of associations, both positive and negative relative to the signifier of and its denotative and connotative descriptors, in which a clustering of common terms seems to be taking place as a function of shifting power relations among individuals and groups within the field. In our analysis, although these discursive clusters correspond roughly (but not exclusively) to the social or occupational role of speakers (e.g., principals all tend to "talk the same talk"), the clusters are not discrete or clearly separated. Instead, at certain points and around certain issues, the talk of individuals in different groups may overlap in agreement or radically split in disagreement. Finally, we believe that the talk about , and the fortunes of its supporters, detractors, and other participants, relates in significant ways to the national conversation about the term, both within academic circles and the national press, and that the relationship is not merely the micropolitical enactment of the national discussion, but instead involves an exchange of talk and terminology with national arguments over not only but over national policy issues like foreign trade, immigration, and multiculturalism.