The Application Of Whole Language Teaching Approach To English Reading Teaching For Non-English Majors Of Vocational College

Reading is one of the most important ways to gain information and knowledge for students. The one of the major teaching objective in vocational colleges is to train students'reading ability in China. But at present, the traditional reading teaching mode makes students lose interest in English reading, and the reading classroom becomes boring. Whole language teaching approach advocates students-centered. Many vivid and attractive teaching activities (listening, speaking, reading and writing activities) around a valuable theme are designed by whole language teachers, which can stimulate students'reading interests and cultivate students'comprehensive language competences.Based on the research results of the foreign educational experts and teachers, the author refers to a lot of whole language theories and reading theories and then summarizes a series of principles of whole language teaching approach. According to a specific teaching example, the author designs a series of whole language teaching activities in order to explore how to inspire students'learning initiative, develop students'integrated language skills and improve students'reading efficiency.The purpose of this paper is to verify whether it is an effective way to apply whole language teaching approach into English reading teaching for non-English majors of vocational colleges. It can stimulate students'initiative and activeness, cultivate students'basic language ability and improve students'reading achievement. In order to verify the argument of this study, the author designs two pieces of questionnaires to know the present English reading teaching for non-English majors of vocational colleges, and then the author makes a semester's experimental research, whose subjects are from two nurse major classes in Li Ming Higher Vocational College. During experiment, the experimental class adopts whole language teaching approach, while control class adopts traditional text-translation approach. After experiment, the author holds a post-test and questionnaire survey in experimental class and control class respectively. The experimental findings reveal: 1) The students in experimental class would love to take part in classroom activities, and the classroom atmosphere is active. 2) The students in experimental class begin to love English reading. Even some of students can actively read English material and scan English newspaper after class. At the same time, the students who raise questions increase. 3) According to post-test, the students'reading efficiency in experimental class is better than that in control class.However, whole language teaching approach still meets severe challenges in English reading class for non-English majors of vocational colleges, such as how to carry out whole language teaching approach in big class size effectively, how to improve English language teachers'whole level, how to overcome the limited English lessons and traditional tests etc, which still should be explored and probed further.