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1. What the heck is "trolling"? If I'm going to be accused of it, I want to know what it means. 2. I feel that I've unknowingly made a Protestant faux pas in the One True Faith, the Roman Catholic church. My original posting did not attack Whole Language. It tried to use Whole Language & Phonics as metaphors to explore a notion in the world of reasonable competent adult readers -- the notion of what I termed slow, careful reading and fast, fluent reading -- and then to tease out some kind of cyclical or complementary relationship between them. 3. Several postings emphasized that Whole Language includes Phonics or should inlcude Phonics. Well, sure. Of course it should. The only purpose of phonics is to get kids to the level where they can read for meaning. I'm interested in the ages beyond this, where some people (like me) are reasonably good slow careful readers but aren't so hot at fast fluent reading. I'm interested in the fact that some adult readers are excellent fast fluent readers but cannot analyse style, metre, or diction. I'm interested in the claim that a certain form of whole-text comprehension goes up at the same time as and as a consequence of increased reading speed (the Speed Reading claim), a claim I take to be true, but which, leaves me wondering: what forms of narrow attention ot meaning are not improved in speed reading courses. 4. I did say (and this, I've deduced, is my faux pas -- I didn't know at the time that I had entered the Whole Language church) that there is some "evidence that phonics are apparently useful for many kids much of the time, and that a pure whole-language approach can have high costs." What's the big deal? Among the many reports I've read that would support this (non-controversial I thought) claim is the October 96 RTE in which it is reported / claimed that "phonics has been sidelined or abandoned altogether in teachers colleges and public schools. In the late eighties, 'a survey of 43 texts used to train reading teachers found that none advocated systematic phonics instruction -- and only nine even mentioned that there was a debate on the issue'" (p316). When Russ accuses me, by dint of my posting, of exemplifying the "lost cause" of Whole Language, I feel I've been accused of desecrated his church, but I don't see anything in my posting to warrant the outrage. I am not a phonics nut. I do believe that a) phonics are a useful tool to get some kids reading; b) there are teachers who have been trained to believe that phonics are bad and/or unnecessary and/or merely a remedial aid; and c) some kids have suffered as a result. To repeat: my real interest is in the roles and relationship of what I posit are two forms of reading: slow-careful and fast-fluent. This was the lightning rod, the ill-formed idea, to which I thought CASLL lightning might attach itself.