On Developing Students' Communicative Competence In College Oral English Teaching

China is a developing country, as China enters into WTO and the implement of the open-door policy, China has resulted in extensive international exchanges and we have increasingly opportunities to meet the need of information society and the development of socialist market economy. Under these circumstances, there are many students and adults who want to learn a foreign language. But what is their purpose of learning a language? Only to memorize the grammar rules? That's not the case. In the process of learning a foreign language, words, phrases are only tools for better understanding. The aim of foreign language learning is to obtain the ability to communicate, to express and receive information, to equip themselves with the necessary skills for the more challenging world. Oral English plays an important role in modern education as well as the construction of economy and the communication of culture. Our country is in urgent need of such kind of people with strong communicative competence. But the problem is that the communicative competence in oral English is low in our country. Most graduates, even postgraduates still fail to be able to communicate in English efficiently and appropriately after many years of English study. It shows that the oral English teaching in college can't meet the needs of society's requirement.The reason for this phenomenon is that students trained in traditional translation--method are usually good at grammar and analyzing sentence structure, but weak in oral communication, teachers pay much attention to the explanation of language points but pay little attention to the practice of language itself. We all know that language is a set of skills, as a language learner, learning a language is like learning a set of skills and communicative competence. Communicative approach has made a strong impact on English methodology; it aims at improving the language learners'communicative competence.In this thesis, the author attempts to improve the actualities of college English teaching by study and discuss the communicative competence and Communicative Language Approach, In order to meet the gap between society's requirement and the students'real competence.