An Experiment For Communicative Activities In Senior High School

It is a common-sense fact that teaching and learning is a type of two-sided activities, in which not only information is exchanged, but also thinking and feelings are also involved. The accomplishment of ELT/ELL (English Language Teaching/English Language Learning) tasks is exactly realized by communicative activities between the teacher and students and among the students themselves (Wang Cairen, 1996). The idea of teaching for communication has already been instilled into the minds of many English teachers. There is no exception in ELT/ELL at senior level in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Particularly, on the use of Senior English for China (published by Longman and People's Educational Press, 1996), the English teachers in middle schools began to apply the communicative ideas to classroom activities, but the efficiency produced seems not quite evident.To get some ideas of the existing weaknesses or problems, the author conducted a questionnaire among parts of the middle school students in five middle schools in the Baotou region, attended several classes, observed and interviewed some of the teachers and students concerned. Then he suggested the necessity and immediacy of implementing 'interest-developed', 'communicative'activities in English classes, stated some relevant theoretical bases, stressed the significance of such classroom activities and made an analysis of different roles of the teacher in classroom activities. Later, a practical model was proposed as its implementation in practice. And finally a small-scaled experiment initially proved its effectiveness in the realclassroom situation and the immediacy of implement with these communicative activities in class.