Educating The Whole Person In TEFL

The ultimate goal of education is to develop the whole person, yet since the eighteenth century, in the Western civilization, people have concentrated on understanding the rational, cognitive functions of human beings" mind, while misusing or denying whatever falls within the realm of the emotions or the non-rational. One of the consequences of this situation is called "emotional illiteracy', which has inevitably brought about a series of problems to language teaching: what learners have received is only some language knowledge and skills rather than their development of the whole persons - although learners do pick up some knowledge of hov\ to learn, which are merely concerned with coping with the demands of the school curriculum, of finding ways to meet the requirements imposed by teachers, strategies which will pay off in the classroom situation but serve no useful purpose in later life. i.e. people have often tended to focus on teaching the form of the target language by presenting pieces of the language in carefully graded steps, at the cost of educating learners how to grow into the whole person through leaning the language. It goes without saying that these problems also occur in TEFL in China.The reason lies in the fact that our TEFL is not underpinned by one coherent educational psychology theory aiming at educating the whole person, thus, TEFL problems in China cannot be totalh1 solved and quality education cannot be finally fulfilled. Therefore, this thesis recommends a social constructivist model to guide our TEFL. This model identifies 4 key factors which influence the learning process -teachers, learners, tasks and contexts. However, none of these factors exists in isolation: they all interact as part of a dynamic, ongoing process because this approach directs to development of the whole person, which is just what our TEFL lacks. In order to better understand development of the whole person, we should first understand the relationshipbetween teaching and education. This thesis proposes that teaching and education should not be separated and polarized: without teaching, education will engage in idle theorizing; without education, teaching will lose its true meaning. Therefore, TEFL is one means to fulfill the aim of English education, and it is also the very outward form to entail the inward content of educating the whole person. In short, our proposition is that the process of TEFL is just that of educating the whole person.Enlightened by the social constructivist model we should accordingly design the EFL curriculum aiming at development of the whole person so that educating learners on learning how to learn in order to enhance their lifelong learning will become the focus of our English education. Since curriculum is to guide teaching, teaching is to serve education, and education is to develop the whole person, we propose that teaching is the pivot to connect curriculum and education. All the above points illustrate that teachers should raise a consciousness of being educators because quality education results from quality teaching.