Construction Of Communicative Syllabus Of English Course For Professional School

Though the communicative Approach has been introduced in the English language teaching for more than 30 years, which emphasizes the cultivation of communicative competence, the professional schools still stick to more traditional approaches which focus more on the imparting of linguistic knowledge and on the training of language skills.In order to enable the students in the professional schools to be more competent in the real communication, this thesis attempts to innovate the current syllabus on the basis of the framework of communicative syllabus to guide English language teaching in the professional schools.With the brief reviews of the syllabus evolution, we can find the syllabus evolution is always accompanied with the development on teaching methodologies. According to Wilkins (1976), the structural syllabus is based on the synthetic approach, while the analytic approach result in semantic syllabus. The structural syllabus focuses on language knowledge, and the semantic syllabus (notional syllabus, situational syllabus) value the communicative competence.Course evaluation has been proved to be an important procedure in the language program development. In order to collect the data to assess the effectiveness of current syllabus, the author conducts a course evaluation by students as well as an examination of the syllabus by teachers. All the data show that the current syllabus is not a communicative one, and that its content needs to be modified to make the teaching more communicative.In order to make the innovated syllabus more relevant to the students' needs, the author also conducts a needs survey and analysis. Through the data collected from the questionnaire and interviews, a communicative syllabus has been designed on the basis of the current syllabus. The thesis also provides some suggestions forthe implementation of the innovated syllabus.It is hoped that the communicative syllabus proposed in this thesis can provide a special guideline for the English course in professional school. Thus, the students can acquire communicative competence, and will succeed in communication in their future career.