The Weekly Sam: Defining Whole Language By Samuel Blumenfeld

The other day, I received an e-mail from a lady in California who asked, “What on earth
is the whole-language system?” She had read my article on the making of the black
underclass   http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/1987/BEL%2002-06%20198706.pdf

in which I had identified whole language as the primary cause of reading
failure among so many black students.

Fortunately, the answer is easy to give, because whole-language professors have been
quite open in defining what they mean by their pedagogic philosophy. So I shall quote
some salient passages from their writings.
In a book entitled “Whole Language, What’s the Difference?” written by three
whole-language professors in 1991, we read on page 32:

Whole language represents a major shift in thinking about the reading process.
Rather than viewing reading as “getting the words,” whole language educators
view reading as essentially a process of creating meanings … Meaning is created
through a transaction with whole, meaningful texts (i.e., texts of any length that
were written with the intent to communicate meaning).

It is a transaction, not an extraction of the meaning from the print, in the sense that
the reader-created meanings are a fusion of what the reader brings and what the
text offers … Although students who learn to read in whole language classrooms
are, like all proficient readers, eventually able to “read” (or identify) a large
inventory of words, learning words is certainly not the goal of whole language.

Another passage from page 19 of the same book may be even more illuminating:

From a whole-language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a
process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a
sociohistorical context. As a transactional process … reading is not a matter of
“getting the meaning” from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be
decoded by the reader.
Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provides and the
knowledge they bring with them (of language subsystems, of the world) to
construct a unique interpretation.
Moreover, that interpretation is situated: readers’ creations (not retrievals) of
meaning with text vary, depending on their purposes of reading and the
expectations of others in the reading event. This view of reading implies that there
is no single “correct” meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.

Now you might think that all of this pedagogical insanity is taking place in some kind of
political vacuum. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Whole language practice is
very politically oriented. We read on page 23:

Learning is a social process … Although whole language educators accept the
importance of learning through individual interactions with the environment
(Piaget 1967), they lean more heavily on Vygotsky’s ideas about the social nature
of learning (Vygotsky 1978).

Whole language takes seriously Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal
Development (Engstrom 1986) which entails stressing the importance of
collaborations (between students and teachers and between peers) through which
students can transcend their own individual limitations.

You might ask: Who is Vygotsky? Vygotsky (1896-1934) was a Soviet psychologist who
worked with Pavlov’s colleagues at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in
Moscow in the 1920s and ’30s. James Wertsch, Vygotsky’s biographer, writes:
[It] is important to note that Vygotsky was a staunch advocate of dialectical and
historical materialism. He was one of the creators of Marxist psychology …

People such as Vygotsky and his followers devoted every hour of their lives to
making certain that the new socialist state, the first grand experiment based on
Marxist-Leninist principles, would survive.
Vygotsky’s colleague, Alexander Luria, wrote: “Vygotsky was … the leading Marxist
theoretician among us … in [his] hands, Marx’s methods of analysis did serve a vital role
in shaping our course.”

Apparently, these same methods of analysis are also serving to shape the course of the
whole-language agenda. The three professors, cited earlier, state on page 67:
The whole language theoretical premise underlying which topics are pursued and
how they are treated is: “All knowledge is socially constructed.”

Therefore all knowing is political. In an effort to promote critical literacy and thus
to help children learn to read the world, not only the word (Shor & [Marxist
revolutionary] Freire 1987), teachers who work with theme cycles try – no matter
whether the topic is overtly “political” or not – to show how the topic is related to
other more general questions.

They try to demystify social institutions by helping children investigate
connections between surface facts and underlying social structures, between lived
experience and structural features of class, gender and race. They know that not
making connections is as political as making connections.
No further explanation needed. But what about phonics, you might ask? Here’s a view of
phonics given in another book on whole language, “Evaluation: Whole Language, Whole
Child.” We read on page 19:

The way you interpret what the child does will reflect what you understand
reading to be. For instance, if she reads the word feather for father, a
phonics-oriented teacher might be pleased because she’s come close to sounding
the word out.

However, if you believe reading is a meaning-seeking process, you may be
concerned that she’s overly dependent on phonics at the expense of meaning.
You’d be happier with a miscue such as daddy, even though it doesn’t look or
sound anything like the word in the text. At least the meaning would be intact.
My response to that kind of imbecilic pedagogy is that any child who looks at the word
“father” and says “daddy” can’t read. It’s as simple as that. But tell that to a
whole-language teacher. Meanwhile, we the taxpayers are paying for it all.

(The above is from the Sam Blumenfeld Archives

http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/main.htm

The Blumenfeld Archives