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

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

From the widest possible range of directions it is becoming obvious that today's agenda in education has a name, and the name is whole language. Names are both important and unimportant. "A rose," as Shakespeare taught us, "by any other name would smell as sweet." Yet the semioticians tell us that names are signs that represent ideas, things, movements, and emotions that themselves take on a reality. (p. 354) In this article, Goodman continued to describe the rise of as the battle cry of grassroots educational reform. In a second article in the same year in another practitioner journal, The Reading Teacher, he asserted, "I Didn't Found Whole Language" (K. Goodman, 1992a), but that assertion did not prevent him from reviewing his own research record of 30 years in the same article in support of the agenda of , thereby initiating a new rhetorical approach within the discourse of those professional journals aimed at the practitioner audience. At the end of 1992, to judge from the volume of overwhelmingly positive articles in teacher-practice journals and commercial magazines during the early lggos (and by the near silencing of other voices), Goodman's claim that was the sign of the moment in literacy research and practice seemed beyond dispute. Clearly, all sides at the time saw as an ascendant discourse that seriously challenged establishment paradigms and politics (Dressman, 1995).

But beginning in the mid-199os, Keith Stanovich (1993/1994) revisited his own research in an article, similar in its rhetorical approach to Ken Goodman's (1992a) article of the previous year, in which Stanovich reframed the talk about within an earlier review of the research he had written "Matthew Effects ..." (Stanovich, 1986): "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he hath" (p. 381; Matthew 25:29, King James Version) - that argued for the primacy of "phonemic awareness" by way of the New Testament. Stanovich's reading of characterized its proponents' position as nothing new, but instead as the latest chapter in The Great Debate (Chall, 1967). Stanovich (1993/1994), which also appeared in The Reading Teacher, was followed later in the year by a commentary in the "Views e'r Reviews" section of IRA'S secondarypractice journal, Journal of Reading (Otto, 1994), endorsing Stanovich's contrast of the "romance" of with the "reality" of the "scientific evidence," all framed, a la K. Goodman (1992a) and Stanovich (1993/1994), within a recounting of Otto's nostalgic trip to the stomping grounds of his youth, Quantico, Virginia ("Once a marine, always a marine"), the previous summer. The critique of Stanovich this time was relegated to the "Letters to the Editors" column of The Reading Teacher, rather than to a format providing "equal time," as was allowed to Edelsky in 199o.

But perhaps the most significant indicator of a reversal in the tide of discourse about is to be found in the "deconstruction" of writing published in IRA'S research journal, Reading Research Quarterly, by Moorman, Blanton, and McLaughlin in 1994. In their analysis of the discourse to date promoting pedagogy - and which appeared in a journal whose primary audience must always be interpellated (Althusser, 1971), or "hailed," as researchers, not practitioners - Moorman et al. (1994a) took the notion of "ownership" to task as: problematical. It extends the language of the economic sphere into an area of life that need not be thought of in such terms. In this case a metaphor imposes real power over its users, who "buy into" the materialistic mindset that devalues critical intellectual activity in our society. (p. 326)