On The Development Of English Communicative Competence Of Non-English Majors Under The Constructivist Theory

With China's extensive contacts with the outside world, English is used more frequently on a lot of occasions. This undoubtedly has a higher request of Chinese English learner's communicative competence. But affected by the traditional teaching method, the learner's communicative competence has not been improved much yet. Many students, especially the college students, who have been taught English for several years, are still the "crippled" in communication and are the "deaf" and "dumb" in English. Though they have got some knowledge of English, they can not speak out and express themselves in English in real communicative contexts. In order to change this phenomenon, we have studied carefully a total new teaching concept—constructivist learning theory and found that the teaching approach it advocates has some common places with the requirement of the development of the students' English communicative competence. According to this, we put forward a constructivist teaching model aiming at improving the students' communicative competence and creates a task-based communicative approach in this model. Finally, the thesis demonstrates the implemental procedure of this approach through an example.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, this thesis contains four chapters. Chapter One discusses the theoretical background of the thesis. First it begins with the basic concepts of the constructivist learning theory and its psychological origins and briefly introduces the six branches of constructivism. And based on mis, it summarizes the constructivist perspective on knowledge, learning and teaching. Then it delineates the definition of communicative competence and the features of communicative language teaching. At last it sums up the similarities between constructivist learning theory and the communicative competence theory. They both put emphasis on the learner's active participation, on the reality of the activities and on the advocacy of"Learn by doing". Chapter Two states the status of the non-English majors' communicative competence. Chapter Three proposes a constructivist teaching model, whose four key elements are: the teacher, the learner, the task and the context. They arc in a dynamic and ongoing process. The last chapter discusses the practical implementation of the model, advocates a task-based communicative approach and shows the implemental procedure of the approach through an example.Finally, the conclusion of the thesis is given. And in the conclusion, we point out that it is not enough at all that die learners only confine their competence training to classroom teaching. The famous educationist Ye Shengtao once said "the aim of the education is for 'not educating"'. The aim of our teaching is not only to teach basic knowledge, but also to teach the students the ways to solve problems, to let the students study by themselves. In the same way, the development of students' communicative competence also depends on learners' own persistent efforts and conscious practice after class. Only in this way can the students' communicative competence be really unproved.