Wholistic approach in English teaching

The primary purposes of education is to produce a good citizen who is mentally and emotionally improved and well balanced with society and environment. English Courses are important courses to educate a person who can keep pace with expanding and changing World, who can follow every kind of improvement outside of his own country and who can express him on international platforms. In today's global World, to train a good citizen, foreign language is becoming more important day by day. Due to this importance, English training starts at 2nd grade at primary school. Each level of English is taught through English curriculum. For this purpose, in Turkey many curricula have been prepared by MEB. Although there have been many changes, these curricula have still been used with traditional methods. The role of traditional methods which focus on merely mental development on unsuccessful state of English teaching is undeniable. However, in culture-related foreign language teaching, the emotional state and attitude of students are essential. Therefore Holistic education philosophy may serve an alternative solution in learning process by improving them with their every aspect. Holistic English teaching bases on holistic concept. Holistic view in Education does not account students as only mental object, but aims to improve them mentally, emotionally and physically altogether. Thus, students both become compatible people to society and they mentally get better understanding. The main purpose of this research is to determine the difference among teachers' and student's opinion according to demographic variations. The research was carried out based on descriptive and scanning model. The universe of the research includes High school English Teachers who work at High school of Ministry of Education in Elazığ and Malatya city center during 2015-2016 education year and 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade High school students in Elazığ province. The sample which can represent the whole universe consists of 23 English teachers who accept the interview and 220 students who accept to fill in the scale in Elazığ in 2015-2016 education years. The data was obtained through an interview form including 10 questions and demographic variations for teachers and a scale which is developed by researcher. The scale consists of 5 demographic and 40 likert type questions which are about holisticism. After the scale was tested in terms of validity and reliability, the scale was applied by researcher for students. The data was analyzed with descriptive statistical technique, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, independent groups "t" test, one way variance analysis (Anova), Mann Whitney U and KWH tests. The data which was obtained through analysis were tabulated and evaluated. During evaluation and inference of the findings, related studies and literature were used. As a result of the answers obtained through interview questions, the teachers who think that their main duty is education rather than training cannot apply holistic view in their classrooms because of some limitations although they adopt holistic point of view. Besides, their epistemological thoughts do not differentiate from each other. According to the teachers current English Curriculum focuses on mental development and it does not have holistic features. Moreover, they think that the course books which are delivered by Ministry of Education are not well qualified enough. They also think that parents' wish to improve their children' mathematical skill affects their holistic improvement negatively. Teachers are generally use communicative approach, role play, direct method and drama in their lessons. According to the findings based on students' opinions, students are of the opinion that teachers sometimes care about method-sense relationship during learning-teaching process and choose the method in accordance. Unlike teachers, students think that English course books meet the expectations.