Improving reading instruction is one of the hottest topics in K-12 education today. It is also one of the most complex, encompassing pedagogy, policy, and politics -- all rooted in a long history of arguments about the best way to teach kids to read. This analysis is a primer on the "Science of Reading" and efforts to implement it across…

US public education faces concerted attack by those bent on corporate control, privatization, regimented reading instruction, and high-stakes testing. One democratic, humanistic, and research-based alternative can be found in the theory and practice of whole language, which empowered teachers and students alike through the 1980s and 1990s -- until…

English literacy competence in the Central Pacific Republic of Kiribati is considered important for employment, overseas study and general engagement with a globalizing world. It is also considered as a key factor in the current government's response to climate change and sea level rise, enabling skilled relocation of I-Kiribati to other countries…

This seminal collection brings together the multiple perspectives of whole language educators over the course of the past thirty-five years. The essays illustrate the complex ways in which whole language teachers have been and continue to be political activists through their interactions with students; the teachers' beliefs about teaching,…

The dichotomisation of literacy instruction into phonics instruction versus a whole language approach fails to realise a fundamental tenet of providing equitable educational opportunities to diverse groups of children. Diversity becomes a problem to solve through "inoculation programmes" or "special" education expertise.…

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…

Seikatsu tsuzurikata is a grassroots movement in Japan that has many parallels to the whole language movement, but it developed completely independently, beginning in the late 1920s. Our research into this movement was conducted in 1984 and described in Kitagawa and Kitagawa (1987). We are now updating our earlier research. Seikatsu tsuzurikata is…

The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an…

"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) Supreme Court Hears Union Coercion Case; What…

Students with special learning problems, like all children, need to learn social studies. The challenge, however, is how to provide access to social studies content in a general education setting to children with mild disabilities. For at least 20 years the traditional textbook-based instructional approach has been found to be ineffective. The…