Application Of Communicative Approach In Continuing English Education

This paper is an attempt to clarify the effectiveness of applying communicative approach to teaching those on-the-job English learners as well as questions involved in the process. "Communicative Language Teaching" has in recent years become a trendy term to include developments in various schools in the methodology of teaching foreign languages. Teachers and applied linguists wishing to examine the fundamental arguments underlying these developments have devoted a lot to the research and experiments of communicative approach.This paper differs from those published articles on foreign language acquisition on the part of regular students at school in the sense that it focuses on the subjects who are working in different positions in our society and whose purpose to learn English is to communicate with people in their daily work.Considering the needs analysis of the learners' purposes in the study, the author wants to find out whether communicative approach is appropriate to these learners and what kind of conclusion could be drawn from the application. Theoretically, communicative approach is a right method for teaching these learners, but as we all know, theory should be based on practice. Language teaching is a practical activity rather than atheoretical notion.In this paper, the author begins with the development and prominent features of communicative approach. In chapter 2, she describes how the chosen subjects acquire language and how they respond to the application procedures and techniques used in teaching. Traditionally, researchers tend to have two classes involved in their experiment in order to make clear contrast when applying communicative approach to students. Without being confined to the traditional way, the author tests one class twice both at the beginning and at the end of the course. Finally, different effectiveness achieved from this method proved this attempt useful and successful.In Chapter 3, the author analyzes the data from questionnaires and tests applied in the procedure. Naturally, some problems would arise from the data analysis, so in the subsequent Chapter 4, the author comes up with some solutions to the problems.In the conclusion part, the author summarizes the application of the approach and presents some tentative thoughts on the chosen subjects, teachers of English and English teaching itself.