The authors examine the first-grade materials in five new basal programs submitted for the 1993 Texas state adoption.1 These series are compared with program materials currently in use in the state (copyright 1986/1987). The analysis focuses on features of the pupil texts (e.g., total number of words, number of unique words, readability levels, literary quality) and features of the teachers' editions (e.g., program design, organization, tone). Results of the analysis indicate substantial changes in the more recent series. The findings are interpreted in terms of historical trends as well as recent developments in the literature-based and whole-language movements. Implications for future research are identified that relate to the study of the implementation and effects of these new programs.Publishers of educational materials have played a significant role in American reading instruction since the early seventeenth century (Smith, 1965). The days of a single dominant material/program like Webster's "blue-back" speller or McGuffy's readers are gone. Also gone are the days when a multitude of programs competed equally in the market place (e.g., Smith reported on 17 "new" programs in the period 1925-1935-a decrease from the previous period). Today, we find the national market dominated by just five or six basal programs. The shrinking number 1 One of the authors of this paper and codirector of the research project is an author for one of the basal programs included in the analysis. No portion of the research was supported by any publisher. Four publishers did provide copies of their materials for this review. We gratefully acknowledge their cooperation. 47 48Journal of Reading Behavior of competitors is not surprising given the current costs of program developmentconservatively estimated at over 40 million dollars (Goodman, 1989). The competition among publishers for a share of the estimated 400-million-dollar annual market sales (Goodman, 1989) is incredibly intense. These publishers must anticipate changes in teaching practices if they are to remain viable; they must walk the fine line between not offering a product that is so new and different that it appeals only to the high "risk-takers" and something that is so conservative and traditional that it is viewed as outdated. In the past, the safe position for most of the successful publishers has been to take a rather conservative stance toward change. Those who have examined the history of basal readers point toward their resistance to innovative ideas (e.g., Chall 1983;Venezky, 1987;Shannon, 1989). Basal systems have been a strong force in sustaining the status quo by offering teachers materials that encourage them to continue to do what traditional teachers have done in the past with only the slightest modifications.This conservative stance may be a thing of the past. Recent changes in the market place have driven publishers to assume a rather different philosophy and direction toward product development. Classroom teachers are taking a much more active...
n the past two decades, research in North America has experienced a shift of seismic proportions in its conceptualization of how literacy can be studied and written about. As recently as Volume 25 (1990) of Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ), only 2 of 16 published studies were primarily qualitative in their methodology, whereas the remainder consisted largely of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of some aspect of decoding or comprehension, along with surveys and more applied studies of instructional interventions. Similarly, only 2 of 23 articles published in grounded in a humanities-based discipline that focused during this period on research in writing, only 5 of 16 empirical studies were qualitative in their focus, and, of these 5, 3 used coding and scoring schemes that yielded numerical findings in table and chart formats. A decade later, however, in Volumes 35 and 36 (2000, 2001) of RRQ, that ratio was reversed. Only 8 of 24 articles were primarily quantitative in their methodology, whereas 14 of 24 were qualitative, and 2 used mixed methods. Similarly, in Volumes 31 and 32 of JLR (1999, 2000), only 5 of 24 articles used quantitative methods, and 19 of 24 were primarily qualitative.But this shift in methodology may be only the outermost manifestation of a recent and far more fundamental shift in how the study of reading and writing, or more broadly, literacy, is conceptualized by researchers. For example, one of the two qualitative articles published in JRB in 1989 was Shannon's (1989) study of the epistemological assumptions about literacy that informed research articles published in the first 21 volumes of RRQ and Volumes 5-28 of JRB. Of 357 articles published in RRQ, Shannon found that 97% fit the assumptions of what he termed empirical/ analytic science (i.e., they focused on reading or writing in bounded terms, typically
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