[WHOLE LANGUAGE] AS SIGNIFIER - CONSIDERING THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF SCHOOL LITERACY

This article examines the use of the term [whole language] within the educational and national media and by the newspaper and interested par ties in 1 college town. Data collected include articles in literacy jo urnals; a search of 5 daily newspapers in the vs and other periodicals and Tv news; a search of 1 local newspaper; and interviews with 70 te achers, administrators, university faculty, and ''concerned citizens'' in a mid-sized city in the Southwestern vs with a major public univer sity. Using the ''discourse-centered approach to culture'' proposed by Sherzer (1987) as a revision of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, our inter pretive analysis of the data argues that the disputes surrounding the term [whole language] have as much to do With cultural, political, and economic issues confronting the vs, and in particular the Southwest, as they do with any philosophical or professional conversation about t he ''best way'' to teach children to read. The implication is that if literacy research is to retain both its legitimacy and its relevance w ithin discussions about literacy, researchers need to become more open about their own cultural and political biases in the stands they take , and more aware of how those positions might be perceived and used by others and by the national media.