This paper discusses major principles characterizing the whole language philosophy of teaching and learning; assumptions of the mechanistic and relational paradigms; whole language practices such as the Shared Book Experience and Reading Recovery for helping students with reading difficulties; and the potential of whole language for developing…

This paper discusses the history of U.S. reading instruction; instructional approaches and learning processes; the whole language view of literacy acquisition; promoting literate behavior through reading to or writing with children, shared reading, and guiding children's reading/writing; and use of the whole language approach with…

A program for language learning-disabled students is described that uses a whole language philosophy to structure contexts that develop students' pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, graphophonemic, and metacognitive abilities underlying speaking, listening, reading, and writing. This paper describes the program environment, children, thematic…