Cambourne and Turbill trace the growth, change and finally marginalisation of progressive approaches to literacy education by examining whole language philosophy in Australia from the 1960s to the present. Using a critical lens, Cambourne and Turbill describe how whole language has been positioned throughout the last nearly 50 years in terms of…

Suggests that traditional measurement-based approaches to evaluation are theoretically inappropriate in whole-language classrooms. Argues that responsive evaluation can be applied at the classroom level and that the data generated will tell more about children's developing control of language than standardized tests do. (RJC)

Responds to an article in the same journal on the rhetoric of whole language. Challenges issues of representation, motives involved, and the small unrepresentative sample involved. Discusses the rhetoric of camouflage. (SR)

Based on years of classroom observation, this book presents the thesis that powerful, critical, active, productive literacy can be achieved systematically, and regularly, with large numbers of the school population, if the principles currently known as the whole language approach are applied. The book is based on the assumptions that learning to…