The Communicative Approach In The Intensive Reading Classroom

It is well known that Intensive Reading is the key course for the students of English at colleges and universities in China, which has been playing an important role in the long history of English teaching. However, in recent years, it has incurred criticisms both at home and abroad. More and more teachers have become aware of some of its weakness. For example, the way of teaching is so teacher-centered that students have little chance to participate in the classroom activities, and become the passive receivers of knowledge and dedicated note-takers. In the teaching process, there is an over-emphasis on language forms but less attention to the language use. Thus, students are structurally competent but communicatively incompetent. All these problems indicate that there is an urgent need to improve the teaching methodology of Intensive Reading.Good and effective teaching methods have always been the objective pursued by language teachers. Among the various past and present perspectives concerning methodology, the Communicative Approach has been one of the most inspiring. Since its birth in the 1970s, it has been widely accepted and adopted in foreign language learning and teaching throughout the world. This approach sets communicative competence as its teaching goal and highlights language use. In the classroom, teaching is more student-centered. Students are encouraged to practice communicating in the target language andlearn from each other. The teacher acts as a facilitator, monitor and organizer. What the Communicative Approach advocates is of great reference value to our teaching of Intensive Reading. The communicative ideas and principles can be applied in our Intensive Reading classroom so as to improve our present teaching methodology and achieve the teaching goal of improving students' communicative competence.The organization of this dissertation is as follows. The problems of the teaching of Intensive Reading and main reasons for the application of the Communicative Approach are displayed in the first chapter. Chapter Two presents the notion of the Communicative Approach, explores its historical source, introduces some theories of communicative competence, and gives a brief account of the general principles of this approach. Compared with traditional methods, the Communicative Approach attaches more importance to students' needs, motivation and the improvement of their communicative competence. It seeks to overcome the weakness of the old and come up with new innovations.Chapter Three concentrates on the approaches and patterns to promote classroom communication. In communicative language teaching classroom, the teacher-student interaction, the student-student interaction, the variability in the patterns of classroom, communication, and the adaptability of teacher's and student's role are essential to increase the students' classroom communicative competence. There are many kinds of activities such as game, role-play and discussion, which aim to recreate real-life communicative situations and give students an opportunity to practice the target language. Teaching is more student-centered. The students are encouraged to take part in communicative activities with minimum intervention from the teacher. The main role of the teacher is to manage classroom activities, monitor students' performance and organize feedback. The whole teaching process is a process of communication in which errors are appropriately treated without interruption of communication.Chapter Four focuses on the application of the Communicative Approach in the Intensive Reading classroom. It analyzes the current situation of Intensive Reading teaching. Some teachers misunderstand the Communicative Approach and tend to neglect grammar teaching or over-emphasize the speaking skill. Others do not monitorcommunicative activities in an appropriately way. Therefore, the teaching of vocabulary should pay attention to both its semantic aspect and pragmatic aspect. The teacher should guide students to the discrim...