The Application Of The Whole Language Approach In Reading Teaching In High Schools

In the whole English-teaching system, reading plays an important part in the English teaching. The reading ability of students can directly reflect the level of teaching. As one of the main objectives of improving the high school students'reading ability, reading is one of the most important parts of English Teaching. Thus the teaching of reading is stressed in the English teaching in the middle schools. And teachers and students also make every effort to improve it, but the result is unsatisfying. It is time-consuming and effort-consuming task which has puzzled us.There are many reasons that lead to the unsatisfying situation in English reading teaching, one of which lies in the teaching method. Translation method and Audio-lingual method have been in the leading part in the English teaching. Teachers always devote most of their time to explaining the new words, phrases and sentence-making. Their main task is explaining and drilling the rules of grammar. The teaching method separates words from the whole text, which ignore the text-analysis ability. In the traditional English teaching, teachers are still the center of the classroom reading teaching while students are just the followers. Teachers ignore students'interests, hobbies, needs and background knowledge of the text. That is to say, teachers don't consider the student as a whole person, but a passive recipient of knowledge. Little by little, students will lose their interests in English learning.The author concludes her own teaching experience and finds an effective teaching method– the whole language approach, according to reading-teaching theory and some documents related to psychology. The approach is based on the theory of the whole, which put emphasis on the language knowledge and experience that has been learned and center around the students'needs. The students'emotional factors in reading must be paid enough attention to and the objective or task which must be made clear and carried out step by step in every phase of the student-centered teaching. So as to improve the students'ability of listening, speaking and writing in addition to the good cultivation of their ability of reading.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, the essay is made up of five chapters. The first chapter tells us about documents, which introduces the importance of reading, the problems of reading, main teaching methods and so on. The second chapter is about the related theories which present the whole language approach is suited to the English teaching of senior middle school in every aspect. The third chapter is about the related experiment, which tells about the design of teaching pattern. The fourth chapter is about the research which tells about the process, the data and results. The fifth chapter is about the analysis of the data, the conclusion and the disadvantages.The result shows that the whole language approach can arouse the students'interest of English study, and improve the reading ability, confidence and creativity.