Whole Language Approach

The four components of language are listening, speaking, reading and writing. All these components are very closely interrelated. My first exposure to the whole language approach was through a session during my early days as a teacher. So far I had known about language development only through the conventional ways. A is for aeroplane, B is for ball and C is for cat and that was also how I thought I had given my child his first exposure to language. After my exposure to the whole language approach, I was able to connect with language development in a very meaningful way. Language development is not restricted to the text books alone, it happens in a variety of other ways - listening, speaking, reading and writing. It has to be looked at as a whole. When a teacher introduces the letter A to the children and displays the words beginning from A in the group, the exposure is also to the rest of the letters which form the words beginning from A.

A sensitive teacher looks for language development opportunities throughout the day's schedule with children.

I am sharing here some of the strategies that I used to implement the whole language approach in my classrooms. During my interactions with children, I consciously used the words which I thought should become a part of their vocabulary. The age relevance was always kept in mind. Since there is a theme for every week , stories for the children were picked up on the basis of the theme. I specifically emphasized on all the new words in the stories. When a theme on "Dinosaurs" was taken up in the class, a lot of books related to dinosaurs were narrated during the circle time. The names of all the dinosaurs and all the words describing their characteristics became a part of the children's vocabulary. All these new words were also displayed in the classroom so that the children were visually exposed to them all the time. Language development during the circle time was happening while children were listening to stories, sharing their experiences, expressing their thoughts and ideas and asking questions related to the themes. During the project time language development was happening in the form of instructions, write ups related to project experiences, recording observations, attempting worksheets.

We had a word box in our class, children wrote new words on paper slips and dropped them in this box. There was a book corner where story books and theme related books were kept.

Language games were a part of the choice time. A story corner was displayed on one of the boards. Children wrote stories and displayed them here. The story corner was sometimes changed to a poems corner and there was also a' how I feel today' corner. At times we had activities where children would pick up an object and share about it, they picked up a paper slip from a box which contained slips with different topics written on them. They would then share their ideas related to that particular topic.

Language development has also to be integrated in subjects like Science, Maths or Social Studies. All the new terms should be displayed in the class so that they become a part of the children's vocabulary.