| Summary: | 碩士 === 南華大學 === 教育社會學研究所 === 92 === English, as an international language, is also an important tool in daily life. English teaching has been incorporated into elementary school curriculum under the Grade 1-9 Curriculum education policy. The age of first-learners has dropped from junior high school level to elementary or even down to pre-school level. As a result, many pre-schools claim to provide English-only teaching environment. These schools quote language learning theories in order to justify English teaching to very young learners claiming English only teaching is equivalent to the whole language learning. However, the theory of whole language is based on the first language learning environment. Whether those English-only pre-schools actually apply whole language learning method or whether those schools are simply quoting a scientific theory to justify such practices will be discussed in this thesis.
This paper apply the theory of whole language teaching along with the perspectives of social linguistic, psychological linguistic and Emergent Literacy as base theories and discuss former topics by qualitative research method and observation. An English-only pre-school is selected as the research sample. In order to discuss and study the topics, clinical observation, data analysis and “in-depth interview” were used to collect the information of actual practice of English-only teaching.
The result reveals two important findings. First, even though the English-only teaching pre-schools assert that English is merely a language used to teach pre-school curriculum, the number of English courses outnumbers the standard pre-school curriculum. Overwhelming amount of materials is forced into young kids in such single-language environment in the attempt to deliver results in a short time to the parents. In sum and all, the pre-school are nothing more than English cram schools. Second, these schools cannot recreate a whole-language environment as they claimed since whole language teaching theory emphasizes the language learning in the first language setting, as well as learning of culture and the logics. On the other hand, the so-called whole language teaching in the English-only pre-schools simply achieve in temporally setting change and language usage alternation. Therefore, those pre-schools should not promote their practice of English-only teaching as whole language learning.
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