Communicative Language Teaching In Oral English Instruction

The basic function of a language is to communicate with it in real-life situation. Therefore the purpose of foreign language teaching should lie in cultivating the learners'ability to use the language practically in its oral or written form. In China, however, there exists a problem in English education that the students often remain deficient in the ability to use the language, especially in its spoken mode, the importance of which has been greatly attached to in the modern society. Many linguists claim that the root of the problem is in the teaching approach itself. Therefore in the early 1990s, the adoption of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), a new teaching approach emerged in Britain in the 1970s, was advocated in China as an innovation on the unsatisfactory"deaf and dumb"phenomena in ELT. However, nearly a decade efforts on the innovation did not seem to have brought the expected results to change the case. Thus many doubts begin to rise from those who believe that it is not feasible to adopt CLT in Chinese situation because China had its special characteristics. The author of the present thesis, however, insists that CLT would be practicable in Chinese environment so long as we endeavor to break down the resistance to CLT engendered by decades of working within the constraints of the teachers'traditional pedagogical values and the skill of structural grading and the consequent emphasis on language form rather than use. As has been shown by previous researches that the unsatisfactory results of the ELT reform in China are contributed to many factors, the top among which may be that CLT is...