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Martha, I appreciate your impassioned plea to reconsider what it is we are doing. I too am concerned about the "relevance" of college developmental courses. I suspect if we looked further into Bohr's students, we would find out that they improved their reading ability because it was a relevant, authentic, necessary task, unlike most of the reading paragraphs present in developmental reading courses. We, too, are currently looking at our "whole language" developmental reading program here at Southwest Texas State University. We are finding some opposite results. Our "remedial" students as defined by a state mandated reading test are performing at or above the so-called "regular" students in overall GPA, performance in high-risk (heavy duty reading) courses like Introduction to American History and Introduction to Philosophy, and most importantly are being retained at a rate better than the "regular" student. We only have tentative data and hope to publish these results (after our administrators see them). We describe much of what we are doing in a article this fall in the Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literature (formerly Journal of Reading). We believe others of you out there are also seeing similar successes. Nobody will promote your program if you don't. Let the rest of us know how well you are doing. David C. Caverly, Ph.D. Professor, Dept. of Curr. and Instruction Southwest Texas State University San Marcos, TX 78666-4616 (512) 245-3100 [log in to unmask]