Communicative Approach And High School English Teaching

Since Communicative approach was introduced to China, it has attracted a number of Chinese linguists to work on it. However, most of them stop proceeding at the level of theoretical study. Just as Professor Wang Zongyan once said: We shouldn't only read the foreign books, we should look back at our own country's condition and experiment with the things that we learned from abroad and prove them, correct them and complement them. This present study tries to do that in this areaFor many years, the traditional Sentence-Text-Analysts method has been used in high school English teaching. As a result, the students who have learned several years of formal English often remain deficient in actually using the language in real communication situations. So we need a new approach to language teaching which will change the emphasis of attention from the linguistic forms to communicative competence. That is, teaching a foreign language should involve a great deal morethan teaching the literal meaning of the words.At the end of 1980s and beginning of the 1970s, the rise of socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, the theory of communicative approach, etc, started a revolution in the field of linguistics. Many linguists began to view language not only in terms of structures, but also the communicative functions that it performs. The shift of emphasis in the aim of linguistics study has exerted a great influence on language teaching, and finally it leads to a new approach in language teaching the CA, namely Communicative Language Teaching Approach, its teaching goal is to train and develop the students' linguistic competence, but also on their communicative competence.What are then the characteristic features of the new approach? Will all the past problems in high school English teaching be solved with its energy?This paper deals with the theoretical background of the Communicative Approach, with an emphasis on studying its enlightment on us high school English teachers, its characteristics of teaching activities , its teaching principles and proposed some practical methods of implementing the Communicative Approach in high school English teaching in China.Finally, I have to point out that the teacher should help the students realize the fact that the English language is indeed dynamic rather than static, depending on their continuing effectiveness and ability to adapt and modify according to the demands of the times, different students, different styles of the teachers and the different environment of the teaching. Communicative approach is not only effective way to improve oral English, other approaches shall also to be applied and considered.Through the study of communicative teaching approach, we can make our effort to find one or more than one road which can meet the needs for teaching and learning English specific to China's situation.