A Study Of Communication Strategies In Non-English Majors' Oral English Teaching

Highly influenced by examination-oriented education system, English teaching has long been focusing on linguistic knowledge and oral English teaching neglected. Teachers, with traditional methods dominated in teaching, emphasize much on explaining language grammar and structure, ignoring learners' communicative ability. As a result, learners still have much difficulty in listening and speaking even after many years' learning. All that calls for the reform of college English teaching and great importance should be attached to it. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), regarding communicative competence development as its core, is usually considered to be the best way.The thesis mainly discusses the strategies and methods of CLT in teaching college spoken English as well as their effectiveness. We make a survey on learners' attitude towards communicative strategies and its application by means of questionnaires, interviews and oral tests. The results indicate that learners hold positive attitude toward achievement strategies while negative attitude toward reduction strategies and learners at different proficiency levels present significant difference for recognition of reduction strategies. It is also found, through interviews, that learners are unable to use communicative strategies in the right and appropriate way though they know various communicative strategies' use in different situations, hence negatively influencing the communicative effect. In this way the teachers' focus should be on cultivating their proper use of communicative strategies to promote their communicative competence. The author hopes to shed light on language teachers and stimulate them to realize the importance of cultivating the learners' awareness about communicative strategies and using them appropriately so that communicative strategies can play a much bigger role in language learning and communication.