On The Communicative Approach In The Teaching Of Oral College English

The basic function of a language is to communicate 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 Approach (CA), 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 English Language Teaching (ELT). However, a decade's 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 CA in Chinese situation because China had its special characteristics. The author of the present thesis believes that CA regards developing learners'communicative competence as its final goal; therefore, it is an effective measure to solve the current problems to change the traditional teaching model with CA and to train students'oral English skill through communication activities. Through a lot of questionnaires and interviews, the author find that CA is very popular among college students and they expect to improve their English, especially oral English ability by means of CA.The thesis mainly discusses the current situation of the college students'oral English learning and the application of CA in China, and it also discusses the practical strategies and methods of CA in teaching oral college English and their effectiveness. It falls into six chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction. The author shows the significance of improving students'English oral ability from the basic viewpoint of language nature to its functions for individual and social needs and argues that application of CA in Chinese ELT would bring a positive effect on the part of the students.Chapter Two is the literature review. The author gives a review of CA theory and its development including various viewpoints on the communicative competence, the communicative approach, the characteristic features of CA, the major principles of CA and some related issues of CA.Chapter Three is the research design. The author describes the research questions, the questionnaires and interviews, and the procedures.Chapter Four is the part for results and discussion. The investigations indicate that CA is generally welcomed by the students and they are highly motivated to improve their oral English through communication activities. They wish their teachers to put CA into actual class teaching.Chapter Five is about the pedagogical implications. The current CET system can not be denied totally, but calls for improvement. We should try to provide an authentic and friendly English speaking environment for our students. A variety of effective oral communication activity patterns are discussed.Chapter Six is the concluding part of the whole thesis, which summarizes the main findings in the research, provides some suggestions for the problems, then states that the empirical study is no doubt far from perfect due to possible limitations, and further research into the application of CA in teaching oral college English is needed.