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

The junior high school English proficiency test highlights the purpose of students’ development, pays attention to the principles of cultivating students’ thinking, cultural awareness and comprehensive ability of using the language. As one part of the nine-year compulsory education stage, junior high school English reading teaching not only bears the duty of laying the solid foundation for English, improving the students’ English reading level and result, but also plays an important role in cultivating students’ English reading interest and learning attitude, and laying a foundation for the ability of using English preliminarily. However, at the present stage, junior high school English reading teaching excessively emphasizes on imparting knowledge of the language points in a traditional way, and ignores the students’ learning response in the process of English reading. Therefore, in the traditional class the students could not understand the reading materials deeply. The subjectivity of the students could not be fully played. Teachers could not teach the background knowledge effectively. The duty of the teachers could not be embodied perfectly.The application of the whole language approach in junior high school English reading teaching provides a worthy thinking perspective in view of real communication for the teaching of English reading, which meets the general requirements of the New Curriculum Standard of Junior High School. English reading teaching strategies integrate the basic teaching principles of whole language approach which is focusing on the whole, the subjectivity of students and authenticity. The integration is helpful to students to learn English language knowledge comprehensively, to exercise listening, speaking, reading and writing language skills synchronously, and to cultivate students’ interest in learning English in English reading class. In view of the fact that there are many conjunction points of the whole language approach and the teaching of English reading, this paper discusses effect of whole language approach on students’ level of English reading and English reading interest through an empirical research.The author used English reading test, questionnaire, interview and other research tools in the empirical study lasting for one term. Through pretest, the author elected a similar level of experimental group and a control group. In the process of teaching, the author used whole language approach in the experimental group and used the traditional teaching method in control group, collected mid-term test and post test score data and analyzed the score data with Independent sample T- Test of SPSS 17.0 software. After conducting a questionnaire survey in the experimental group and data analysis, then selected 9 students getting an interview from the experimental group randomly, and data summary and analysis. Through the contrastive analysis of experimental data and student feedback we can find that the English reading level, the behavior and learning attitude of the students has improved significantly. Students’ English reading interest has been trained effectively as well. The study shows that the whole language approach can effectively improve the students’ level of English reading, cultivate students’ reading interest, and has a positive effect on English Reading Teaching in junior middle school.