Letters to the Editor

L E T T E R S T O T H E E D I T O R Whole Language In an article entitled, "Some Concerns about Using Whole Language Approaches With Deaf Children" (American Annals of the Deaf July 1992), David Dolman offers the view that deaf children would be better served by a transmission teaching model based on drills and basal readers than by whole language. He lists some of the suppositions behind the whole language movement and counters them with suppositions from the traditional skills and basais camp. However, in an apparent bid to avoid offending whole language proponents, he suggests that some components of whole language might be retained. This is precisely why defending whole language is difficult. To those from whom it must be defended, whole language is an approach that they invariably suggest be combined with existing materials or approaches to make a "safe" eclectic mix that won't offend. The problem with this view is that whole language is not an approach but a philosophy, which includes, as Dolman indicates, such tenets as "the assumption that students are born to succeed rather than fail and that reading and writing are done for real purposes" (p. 281). Whole language also encompasses theory and includes theories of language learning that have come to be accepted as truisms. Few people would deny, for example, that language is "personal" and "driven by a need to communicate," and "shaped toward societal norms," or that "language is empowering" (p. 279). Thus, those who seek to hang on to traditional ways of teaching find it difficult to dispute whole language in its entirety and try to meld it into something that will fit within their own biases. However, as a philosophy, whole language will not mesh with other approaches or materials, and the whole language tenets cited by Dolman are some of the very tenets that cannot be combined with the skills and drills, transmission model of teaching that Dolman seeks to defend. What Dolman and proponents of the eclectic position fail to understand is that two disparate paradigms encompass these views of teaching—the holistic paradigm and the reductionistic or mechanistic paradigm —and the two do not mix. For example , if one truly believes that children are born into the world trying to make sense of the world in their own way, one cannot also condone the linear, preprogrammed menu of basais and work sheets based on the assumption that the child will be ready at a predetermined time to focus on the information selected by the program. As another example, let us look at two views of how reading occurs. In the bottom-up model espoused by proponents of basais and skill building, reading is a process of addressing each letter and each word separately, gradually building toward a message. Proponents of whole language see reading as a process of drawing on past knowledge to predict the message, with minimal attention to the print. It is not possible to operate on both premises simultaneously, and the mixed instructional messages provided by the two paradigms would in all likelihood have a detrimental effect, particularly on young readers. Thus, the argument can be clarified by looking at the issues as a skills approach versus whole language, rather than the comfortable "try anything" stance that appeases educators and confuses children. For his refutation of whole language, Dolman draws in part upon the ethnocentric assumptions of King and Quigley (1985), which are typical of most hearing researchers, that "Hearing provides many of the requisite skills necessary to master reading and writing " (Dolman, p. 279) and that beginning readers need special help in learning to decode words (p. 280). For many years hearing researchers have assumed that the process of reading and writing must be acquired through the auditory channel because that seems to them to be the way they acquired literacy. Dolman also takes the position of King and Quigley that the use of syntactically simplified basais is appropriate for deaf children. From a holistic perspective, it is important to go to the source—in this case, deaf people themselves—to discover what the process looks like. In this regard , it is...