Developing Medical Students' English Communicative Competence

There is now a common understanding in English teaching that its ultimate aim is to develop students'communicative competence. However, quite a few medical students in the author's college lack the ability to appropriately communicate with others in English, which makes the English teachers eager to change this situation. Guided by this goal in English as a foreign language (EFL), and based upon the theories of the communicative competence by Hymes, Canale & Swain, etc. and the theory about language teaching, this thesis attempts to explore a feasible and effective way to develop the medical students'communicative competence. Considering the characteristics of the medical students and the teaching features in her college, the author presents an integrated method—through integrating Traditional Teaching Methods (TTM) and Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), aiming at developing the students'communicative competence.TTM emphasize the language accuracy, however, they separate the teaching of language from communicative meaning and neglect the actual use of language. As a result, TTM are not effective in developing students'communicative competence. Compared with TTM, TBLT helps learners to learn real language for use in the real world and due to its distinct advantages has gained increasing popularity among teachers and researchers. However, students may achieve the goal of communication without paying attention to the language form, which is an indispensable part of communicative competence. Laying a solid foundation of linguistic competence is a prerequisite to developing students'communicative competence. On the other hand, TTM which have been applied in China for decades, still have some valuable attributes and have been proven effective in developing students'grammatical competence and reading comprehension. It is unwise to abandon TTM totally. While it is justifiable to break with TTM, we should also guard against throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Traditional wisdom may be useful in tackling modern problems, and this part of tradition is what we should treasure and cherish. Therefore, this thesis is intended to make an exploration into the developing of communicative competence of Weifang medical students through integrating TTM and TBLT. This thesis consists of five chapters besides introduction and conclusion. The full text is organized as follows:Chapter 1 is the literature review. This part makes an introduction to the theory of communicative competence presented by some influential linguists from both at home and abroad in order to have a better understanding of the concept of communicative competence. Meanwhile, the communicative competence employed in this paper is clarified.Chapter 2 expounds the theoretical basis, giving an objective evaluation of TTM and a brief introduction of TBLT including definitions of the task, types of task and its strengths and limitations. The feasibility of integrating the two is also illustrated.Chapter 3 covers the methodology employed, raises research questions, and explains the subjects chosen, instruments applied, and the procedures of the experiment. A pre-questionnaire was designed to investigate medical students'attitudes toward TTM and TBLT. An experiment was carried out to test the feasibility and effectiveness of the integrated method.Chapter 4 presents the results and discussions. The results of the pre-questionnaire show that a majority of medical students have a positive attitude towards both TTM and TBLT, which further justifies the feasibility of integrating the two. After a whole term's experiment, the data results indicate that compared with TTM and TBLT, the integrated method is more effective in developing students'communicative competence.Chapter 5 provides some implications for developing medical students'communicative competence such as designing a variety of appropriate tasks, teaching grammar and vocabulary in the meaningful context and so on. Finally comes the conclusion of the whole thesis. Major findings and some limitations of this research are presented. Despite the limitations, this thesis is expected to shed some light on college English teaching. Traditional teaching methods may not be exclusive to some new approaches; what is crucial is that we should try to find a suitable way to combine them for the best results and try to find a pedagogically sound and empirically grounded position for the development of students'communicative competence in China.