Communicative Approach And Its Implementation In China's English Teaching

Language is a means of communication. No doubt that foreign language teaching is to cultivate students' communicative competence of using a foreign language. But as far as the effective ways of teaching and learning a foreign language is concerned, people have some controversial ideas. The teaching method which have been used in China's English teaching were: grammar-translation method, listening and speaking method and situation method, etc. By the end of 70's of the last century, the communicative approach have been introduced into China for already over 10 years and been used by some colleges and universities, but it has not been generally accepted. It's necessity and practicality are yet to be discussed and researched.The communicative approach emphasizes the teaching content being functional and notional, the purpose of which is to learn to use language to do things, it also emphasizes the "authenticity" and "large quantities of taking-in" and the interactiveness between teacher-student and student-student.The communicative approach stresses that the teaching material should originate from people's daily life. These materials are closely related with people's real life and are involved in a large area, the content is about the daily life, technology, economic and trade. The rich material and large quantities of taking-in are all helpful to increase students sensitive perceptive and to widen their knowledge and vision, cultivate students' communicative competence on various occasions.This paper reviews the historical background of communicative approach, states the relation between communicative approach and the traditional method, analyzes the research situation of the communicative approach in China. Then, by taking the Application of the Sino-British Communicative English Teaching Project in Tianhshui Normal University as an example, it investigates and analyzes the application effect of the project by Questionnaire and visiting talk, thus summarizes the good points and disadvantages of the communicative approach both as a teaching notion and approach. Meanwhile, the writer also points out the various inhibitors met in application of this approach and some enlightment of the project to the whole English teaching in China . The final conclusion is: like any other approach orteaching methods, communicative approach unavoidably has its own shortcomings and limitations. But it also has advantages which any other methods do not have. In order to meet the In order to meet the needs of reform and China's joining in WTO, the students must be equipped with the communicative competence which is proper , fluent, and acceptable. So , according to the reality of China's basic English teaching, we should make good use of Communicative approach in English Teaching Reform, and combine it with traditionalmethod to form a new approach--the integrated approach, combine teaching of the languageknowledge and developing students' communicative competence , let the communicative approach play its full role and thus provide a better service for China's English teaching.