A Preliminary Study Of College Students' Oral Communicative Competence

Nowadays, English as a communicating device is playing a more and more important role. Therefore, English teaching and learning become matters of considerable social importance. In order to know the present situation of college students'oral communicative competence, a questionnaire survey is made on it. Much of the traditional research on it is either from the perspective of speech act or pragmatic failure, while in this research, three mutually related communicative perspectives proposed by Verschueren (1999), Sperber & Wilson (1986,1995) and Gumperz (2003) are combined in the process of analyzing the students'utterances. The writer tries to construct a model, that is analyzing the students'utterances with the contextualization cue as a focusing in the process of inference. Through empirical investigation and data analysis, we find that most of the students acquire little awareness of culture and context which greatly affect their oral communicative competence. That may suggest in traditional foreign language teaching, linguistic knowledge is given much more attention while the competence of using language in real-world situation is usually ignored. Then we may conclude that the main reason of poor oral communicative competence lies in teaching English without adequate language milieu. Therefore, there is a good reason for us to put forward the task-based language teaching to be practiced in college English class teaching. That is, what the task-based approach pursues is the ideal state that the theory of language acquisition means to arrive at, in which the most important is the variety of tasks provides a high chance for learners to make use of what they have learned previously for the purpose of communication or practice, in which learners pay great attention to the meaning rather than to the form. Besides, it has its specific features, forms and teaching steps. The development of process of TBLT represents a change of focus and a revolution in syllabus design. The followed experiment proves that task-based language teaching put forward in college class teaching to some extent is effective. Besides, the thesis points out that we shouldn't abandon other foreign language teaching methods when using the present one, and on the contrary, we should integrate their advantages in the practical teaching. What's more, the empirical investigation and analysis and the experiment show us that FLT curriculum should also be both learner-centered and communication-oriented and the teacher should cultivate the students'awareness of culture and context through implementing a serious of activities.