A Holistic View of Language.

This paper presents the advantages of an analytic, constructivist, holistic view of language learning and training, whether native or foreign, written or listened to, productive or receptive. It is a perspective which is in direct opposition to the basic skills approach which is so prevalent in curriculum and materials today. This holistic position respects such skills only if they are not wrenched from the context of meaning and not taught for their own sake or beyond the point of their usefulness. The paper addresses current confusion about the definition of holistic. Context is the critical issue: setting the linguistic forms in a communicative competence framework. It is claimed that the fields of language and literacy have focused their instructional materials and testing content on decoding skills. This approach is at odds with the natural direction of language learning: from function to form. Whatever claims can be made for a holistic approach to training skills, there is one man who has benefited uniquely from such a position. He is a wealthy industrialist in Texas who was on trial for soliciting the murder of both his estranged wife and the judge in his divorce trial. Had the jury determined him guilty, he could have been sentenced to as many as 99 years in jail. Major evidence against him consisted of two surreptitious tape recordings of conversations between him and his accuser. Naturally, the newspapers found the case very interesting and, in their inimitable style, journalists selected from the thirty minutes of tape certain passages in which it appeared that the industrialist was, indeed, quite guilty. This technique is at least as old as the Bible, in which we read, for example, that the devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes. Further condemning evidence came from the State's own transcripts of these conversations. In written, linear, form, the case against the industrialist looked pretty bleak. The approach used by the prosecution and by the press could be labeled a synthetic one in which various parts served as the focus. These parts were then put together to form the position that our man was indeed guilty. The distinctiveness of evidence put together synthetically (as opposed to analytically viewing these parts in a contextually relevant whole) was first stated lucidly by Imanuel Kant (1949, p. 14), who saw the synthetic approach as expansive and the analytical as explicative. In his excellent analysis of the distinction between these approaches, Magoon (1977, p. 656) observes that a major development in Western philosophy in the twentieth century was the analytic method, growing out of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which the best way to discover how other minds function was by making real-life observations