Cultivation Of Non-English Majors' Oral Communicative Competence Via New College English

It is generally agreed that the ultimate purpose of foreign language teaching is to cultivate students' competence to communicate by means of the target language. In College English teaching process, however, it has been found that linguistic knowledge is over-emphasized while the commimicative competence, especially the oral communicative competence is ignored. This dissertation, by reviewing various language teaching and learning theories, examining the deficiency of the traditional college English teaching and the characteristics of the New College English, proposes an effective teaching model-a balanced activities teaching model. The purpose is to enable students to achieve the objectives the revised College English Teaching Syllabus has set for the college English teaching, promote the non-English students' oral communicative competence by learning New College English.The American writer Krashen claims that adults learn second language mainly in two ways-"acquisition" and "learning". "Learning" only serves monitoring and correcting one's language output. It is "acquisition" that functions as the important means of cultivating their communicative competence. And language acquisition can only be obtained by means of "roughly-tuned" input. The British applied linguist Allwright, however, believes that involving students in a variety of communicative activities (language output) alone can cultivate students' communicative competence. Therefore, in our foreign language teaching practice, we should take into consideration the balance between language input and output. Language input should be mainly based on roughly-tuned input, taking finely-tuned input as an addition. And language output mainly involves varied communicative activities plus some teacher-controlled practice. Only in this way can we successfully cultivate students' communicative competence. In our traditional College English teaching practice, however, the cultivation ofstudents' communicative competence, esp. their oral communicative competence has been long ignored because of the limits of the teaching syllabus for non-English majors, teaching materials, teaching approaches the teachers adopt and the teaching time. Fortunately, a new syllabus which takes the cultivation of non-English majors' communicative competence as its teaching goal has been issued, and a proper set of teaching materials which attaches adequate attention to the balance of language input and output has also come into being. But these alone cannot guarantee the accomplishment of this objective. Therefore, in our College English teaching practice, a series of principles should be observed in order to achieve this teaching goal. They are: a).Balance between acquisition and learning; b).Contextualism; c).Authenticity; d).Balanced task-based approach; e).Learner-centered classroom; f).hitegration of speaking with other language skills. Thus an effective teaching model-balanced activities teaching model is put forward. And at the end of the paper, a teaching sample is showed to illustrate how to carry out the model in the teaching materials New College English in order to cultivate the communicative competence, esp.the oral rammunicative competence in non-English majors.