Whole Language Learning Philosophy

We all know that all students do not bring the same kinds of knowledge, language habits, and strategies for learning to school. We as educators must recognize the tremendous heterogeneity to be found among our students and take responsibility for presenting all students with a range of options for organizing knowledge and using language.

Looking at the whole language as a way of thinking, teaching, and learning in a social community where learners are continually supported to use language (reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, drawing, making sense mathematically and scientifically, and so on) in order to inquire and to construct their own understanding of texts and real-world issues and to apply the conditions of language learning that we all use in the real world to the classroom. It provides children with a wide range of meaningful language and literacy experiences across the entire curriculum, includes evaluation and parent involvement and facilitates the development of responsible, cooperative, and caring individuals for whom language is a source of increasing empowerment.

From that point, I look back at my time during English classes, compared to what I am learning now about the whole language theory and the balanced literacy approach, I could identify the problems or bad habits existing in the teaching and learning processes that time and nowadays traditional classrooms. There are bad habits on the part of both the teachers and the students, as some teachers pay too much attention to grammar so what the students get from the text are only some grammar rules. They make little progress in reading skills, let alone listening, speaking, writing, and other skills.

Another bad habit is vocabulary-oriented; the teachers overemphasize the importance of vocabulary. When they deal with a text, the first and the most important thing to do is to teach new words, and explain their usage in the process of teaching the text. The students taught in this way will get nothing but new words from the text. Their reading ability cannot be improved effectively. Consequently, the teaching of reading will be likely unsuccessful. The students may have a very large vocabulary, but they can not communicate with the foreigners, nor can they understand a passage completely. 

The purpose of reading is to understand the passage well and to get useful information from it. If we just emphasize grammar or vocabulary and ignore the fact that language is a whole, it is impossible for us to understand the intention of the writer completely. Most of the information we get may be irrelevant. 
Grammar and vocabulary are just the necessary means of reading, but they are not the ends of reading. We should also realize that there are also some bad reading habits on the part of the students that affects the comprehension of the passage such as vocalizing means reading with pronunciation. The main cause of it is that the students lack training in silent reading. Another bad habit is being too dependent on dictionaries. we can imagine the frequent use of dictionaries and how the reading of the whole passage is interrupted because of that. So is the understanding of the information of the passage. These bad habits of both the teacher and the students have bad influences on the teaching of reading and reading comprehension. 

In whole language classrooms, where the teachers teach the language as a whole and provide the students with a lot of demonstrations by organizing and leading in group activities, discussing, reading and writing together with the students. Collaboration and support may take the form of peer editing, partner reading, collaborative research and writing, small-group work, and more. The important thing I have found is that the teachers take the students’ needs, aims, and interests of learning into consideration when they teach and try to arouse the students’ interest. That would influence the assessment and instruction to work together; self-evaluation, reflection, and goal setting are integral to daily instruction and practice. 

Students and teachers are constantly self-monitoring and reflecting-students are viewed as learners, not test takers. We want students to become active participants in a classroom literacy community by giving the students the chance to search, to get to know, and to summarize, select books they like to read, writing about, it is more about student-centered classrooms where learning is about the importance of sharing their knowledge and interests with others and understanding the social aspect of reading.

References:

1. Literacy At The Crossroads. Crucial Talk About Reading, Writing, and Other Teaching Dilemmas by Regie Routman. Retrieved on October 19, 2017.