Class Context For Foreign Language Communication

An experiential learning perspective is adopted in this paper to examine and design class contexts for the development of foreign language communicative competence. The author believes that the developmental process of foreign language communicative competence is closely associated with the class contexts that are intentionally designed by the foreign language teacher. Foreign language learners experience the external class contexts, internalize them and transform them into internal mental contexts. These internal mental contexts are woven together with the communicative foreign language used in the foreign language class, and become the learner's underlying foreign language communicative competence in their future communicative activities. Class contexts can be classified into'real contexts','simulated learning contexts'and'virtual learning contexts'. Real contexts refer to the real-life activities of using the foreign language to communicate between the teacher and the students or among the students. Simulated learning contexts are the communicative activities designed to practice foreign language by imitating real life communication. Virtual learning contexts are virtual communicative situations created in movies, videos, or the Internet. The author not only expounds the nature of experiential learning in class contexts and further discusses the implications of the study to the foreign language instruction aimed to develop the learner's foreign language communicative competence, but also explores the educative effects of different class contexts to the foreign language learners.