Whole Language goes up, reading standards go down. Fact or fiction? Tom Nicholson, PhD Associate Professor School of Education University of Auckland New Zealand Phone/Voicemail: 64-9-373.7599 Ext 7372 Fax: 64-9-373-7455 email:
[email protected] Whole Language goes up, reading standards go down. Fact or fiction? The rise and rise of whole language In The Netherlands, in a village called Naarden just outside Amsterdam, is a memorial to Jan Amos Comenius. As our tour group stood beside the statue of Comenius, the guide said that one of the great contributions of Comenius was to publish a book for children, which had ‘designs’ (line illustrations). Within the illustrations, key objects were given numbers, to correspond with words in the written text, which were also numbered. Thus, children could relate the meanings of the printed words to objects that were in the sketches, and thus read more easily, since they could use picture clues to help work out the written words. Yetta Goodman (1989) has argued that ‘Visible World’ (Comenius, 1658/1967), was the first picture book written for children, and a philosophical precursor to whole language. Where did the term ‘whole language’ come from? It seems that Comenius was the first to use the term. But what happened after that? In the 1960s, when the First Grade Studies Project (Bond & Dykstra, 1967) was carried out, many different methods of teaching reading were compared, but there was no mention of whole language. Yetta Goodman (1989) reports that the term ‘whole language’ did not occur in recent times until it was used in an article by Harste and Burke (1977).