A Critical Survey Of The Communicative Approach And Its Implications For CET In China

At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the rise of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, the theory of communicative competence, etc. started a revolution in the field of linguistics. Many linguists began to view language not only in terms of its structures, but also in terms of the communicative functions that it performs. The shift of emphasis in the aim of linguistic study has exerted a great influence on language teaching and finally it leads to a new approach in language teaching — the Communicative Approach. What are then the characteristic features of the new approach? Will all the past problems in language teaching be solved with its emergence? And what implications does it have for College English Teaching (abbreviated as CET in the following) in China?This paper attempts to make a critical survey of the Communicative Approach in terms of its theoretical basis and general principles, and to explore its feasibility for College English Teaching (CET) in China from the perspectives of syllabus design, methodological procedures, classroom activities and language testing. Based on a classroom experiment, it points out that the Communicative Approach is fundamental in at least two ways: it opens a wider perspective on language and a wider perspective on language learning;however, several problems remain unsolved. It is argued, therefore, that the Communicative Approach cannot be copied in our classroom College English Teaching, but rather it should be adapted to China's realities and combined with the Structural Approach. At the end of the thesis, a communicative proficiency-oriented approach is proposed for CET.