ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE THROUGH THE WHOLE-L

Traditional education was essentially school-centered, i.e. a rather elitist approach to teaching the three R's; elitist because it failed to exploit the productive potential of all the school children, because curricula were culturally and socially biased towards the more affluent segment of the population, because pedagogical methods were based and implemented on the basis of theories of learning which often lacked scientific, or even serious, verification. Socially, then, it was undemocratic; pedagogically it was undergirded by a weak, ambiguous, or unproven theoretical foundation. Furthermore, knowledge was arbitrarily fragmented. In the case of language, for example, vocabulary was taught out of meaningful context; grammar was a set of strict rules to memorize; translation of written texts was the method of choice in the learning of a second (or other) language. Rote memorization of paradigms and imitation of the teacher's modeling behaviors were, in fact, the basic instruments of learning whether a first or another language.

Thus Western education has historically resorted to an academic ideological approach to literacy.

Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Steiner, Fr£bel, and others discovered the child-as-learner-and-social-being gifted with unique personality and learning style, rather than as a fact-recipient. Hence, learner-centered education was born. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712

. . .
nce of hearing, listening, speaking, reading, writing has disappeared. Writing is likely to be taught at the same time as reading. Speaking, however primitive, may start in the first lesson--as long as it is functional. Whole-Language assumes that theoretical fragments of language (phonology, lexicology, morphology, syntax, etc) will all get sorted out naturally, whether in L1 or L2 acquisition--even if they fail to be labeled with esoteric linguistic terms. The German child learning English will unconsciously learn that the verb does not come at the end of the sentence, but right after the subject. There is an increasing number of teachers, however, who are finding out that a purely holistic approach is not pedagogically economical--nor even optimally effective, given that time and environments have rather strict limits in formal instruction. To them, a holistic approach does not preclude an analytical component--how important is the real bone of contention. They feel that language, even naturally acquired, is not learned exclusively through holistic apprehension; that the learner also cognitively identifies linguistic fragments and then uses them to build communicative messages into increasingly complex syntactical structures.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
L1 L2, Page Thomas, Introduction Traditional, Foreign Language, English English, Boston None, Secondary Students, Japanese German, Whole-Language Action, JH Pestalozzi, l1 l2, holistic approach, york ny, mccloskey 1988, elementary schools, learning language, teaching styles, whole-language approach, becoming whole-language school, memorization paradigms, irwin 1989, harste burke 1977, national reading conference, rote memorization paradigms, international dictionary education,
Approximate Word count = 2632
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)