Annotation III

The Study of Whole Language Approach
Source: Liang ju, Lee. (2006) Whole Language Education, Taipei: National Books
According to the last teacher-student conference, I found it difficult to develop my paper and annotations if I continued to work on the topic, which emphasized the relationship of orality and literacy. Therefore, I would like to modify my topic a little bit and discuss about whether orality and literacy should be referred to separately or not. Then, I would like to introduce one of the teaching strategies, called “Whole Language Approach” or “Whole Language”, to this annotation.
Whole Language Approach is a new language teaching methods developed in 1990s. The purpose of Whole Language is to enhance language teaching. Whole Language differs from native-speaking countries, such as America and the UK, to non-native speaking countries, like Taiwan and China. In America, Whole Language experts tend to reflected upon the loss alphabetical spelling methods, called Phonics. In contrast, in Taiwan, Whole Language specialists pays more attention to whether orality and literary should be separated. Their answer is “no”. We can see Whole Language can be put into practice differently in different countries.
The reason why Whole Language experts disapprove of the separation of orality and literacy is due to “holism”. Those who support Holism think that it will have a bad effect on learning language if teaching lessons or materials divided into small pieces. They think that if learning is divided into small pieces, this learning will not be coherent and complete. To be specific, we used to learn language in four individual aspects, including listening, writing, reading, and speaking. For Whole Language supporters, language should be regarded as a whole communicative system that learners should learn language by their past background knowledge and experience.
Besides, Whole Language supporters agree to the following ideas: First, by means of encourage students to read books; students can improve their writing and speaking. Second, encourage parents to spend some time accompanying their children when they are reading. Third, different students should be taught by different teaching methods. Fourth, students should read books quietly by themselves. Last but the least, students should participate in many activities so that they can express own ideas in his writing.
In conclusion, we can know that the main idea of Whole Language is that language can not be separately discussed and learned. In addition, they think learners should initiate their language learning by themselves. The most important of all is that the motivation of learning language. Whole Language Believers trust if language learners continue to learn by this way, they will learn languages more completely.