"Whole Language" Approach

The theory of “whole language” from “Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching” by Richards and Rodgers has reinforced my beliefs on some basic principles of language teaching that will help motivate the learners:

• Write for pleasure / for real communication (natural approach)
• Read for a real purpose
• Emphasize meaning and make sense of meaning; contextualize language in an authentic situation, making the expression meaningful in a social context.
• Use a student-produced text for teaching and learning
• Students have options over what they read and write

In my own teaching practice, I have been trying to apply some of the above-mentioned principles in my class, and the more I use them, the more I have found the power of them. For example, when I teach the lesson on “the home”, I use real apartment rental advertisements that I found in a Chinese newspaper (I made slight modifications to remove some unfamiliar words so the students would not be discouraged by too much new vocabulary). I found that the students were really interested in reading them.

When it comes to writing and speaking, I let students create a dialogue about dating (the unit we studied), and perform it, which was both successful and unsuccessful. It was a success because everyone was excited to perform and to be able to see his or her videotaped performance, and this motivated everyone to participate. It was not a complete success because more than sixty percent of the students wrote their scripts closely following the dialogue in the text, including the scenarios and sentence patterns. I felt this was not authentic enough. I feel that the students would not be able to apply fully what they have learned in the “real world,” and therefore, they have not mastered the content.

Some insights I had from the reading include the ideas of using students’ work and giving students options for reading and writing materials. I feel that there is still a distance from where I am now and where I should be in terms of motivating students and making my classroom truly dynamic.

There are some arguments that I disagree with from the reading. Making language meaningful and purposeful is no less significant for adults than for young children, while the author claims that it usually works only for young children. In my opinion, it is more effective to use the “whole language” approach for adults because adults learn languages with a clear purpose in an educational setting. Many of them learn a language for their career, personal needs and academic pursuits, some learn for their personal interests.