Communicative Approach And Its Implications To The English Major's Oral Proficiency

In language teaching, the origins of the Communicative Approach can be dated back to the late 1960s. As its name indicates, the Communicative Approach views language learning as a means mainly for communication. This idea appeals to those who seek a more humanistic approach to language teaching and has been widely employed at all levels of foreign language teaching and learning since then.Likewise, the Communicative Approach, since its first introduction into China at the end of the 1970s, has also exerted profound influence on English teaching and learning in China when traditional teaching methods were no longer considered appropriate for achieving English major'communicative competence.This paper attempts to probe new spoken English teaching pattern that by employing Communicative Approach (CA) or communicative language teaching (CLT) in improving English majors'oral proficiency. And it proves the importance of implementing the CA in English classroom teaching by analyzing the current situation of English teaching, and takes spoken English teaching for English majors as an example to probe into how to implement the Communicative Approach in the classroom according to the features, objectives and principles of the CA.The author has been studying the application of the Communicative Approach to improve the oral proficiency for English majors for one semester. There are some satisfactory findings, which are suitable for the students of English majors, such as: the CA has straightforward Framework, CA is easy to handle, CA emphasizes meaning and form as well, CA encourages students acquire language in communication, and that CA as a practical and effective approach is popular among students of English majors.