ABSTRACT
There are numerous examples of research commonplaces, often technical innovations, reaching the world of education twenty years after their first appearance (Rasch testing methodology, efficiency frontier analysis). However the influence of Whole Language upon the teaching of reading in Britain and elsewhere in the 1980s has been more than a mere anachronism, whose point of origin (a ‘psycholinguistic’ school of thought in the late 1960s and early 1970s), has continued, like a defunct star, to radiate long after its intellectual demise.
