Issues in Applied Linguistics

The current political atmosphere surrounding literacy education in the United States pits whole language and phonics-only instruction against each other. Whole language teachers, already besieged by parents and district administrators clamoring for evidence of rising standardized test scores, are coming under increasing public pressure to abandon meaning-based language arts curricula in favor of basic-skills instruction. Using ethnographic methodology, the study from which data for this article are drawn examines how local language arts pedagogy is instantiated in classrooms. In particular, this project focuses on documenting how teachers use an ecology of social practices to form a comprehensive literacy curriculum. The analysis will show how one first grade teacher creates a context for learning in which the whole and parts of text are in dialogic relation. By gaining an understanding of current practice, this study may help teachers construct literacy curricula that more effectively addresses the tension they have experienced within language arts pedagogy. By understanding the practices of real teachers, we will be in a better position to enter the public debate over the strengths and weaknesses of both whole language and phonics pedagogies by providing evidence of how teachers merge process and skills in their classrooms.