Study On Application Of Communicative Pedagogy To The Teaching Of Listening And Speaking At Vocational Colleges

This thesis gives a brief introduction to the origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from late 1960s to the development of CLT. CLT is an"approach that aims to (a) make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and (b) develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication."(Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers, 1986: 66) Although people's understanding of CLT varies, the following three principles suggested by Richards and Rodgers (1986:72) have been generally agreed upon: (a) communication principle; (b) task principle and (c) meaningfulness principle. After establishing the theoretical frame, the author of this thesis makes an intensive analysis on the current status of English teaching at vocational colleges and tries to find out the problems and puts forward the strategic hypotheses which aim at solving the problems effectively.This paper aims at finding a more effective English teaching method for teaching listening and speaking at vocational colleges. The idea comes from the writer's teaching practice and the current status of listening and speaking teaching at a vocational college. So the writer explores in using two different teaching methods, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and the Traditional Grammar-translation Method, in two of his classes. He uses the quantitative experimental method to do the research. He conducts the pre-course and post-course questionnaires, the pre-test and post-test, and a post-test interview of the subjects of the experimental class and the control class respectively. After making detailed comparisons and analysis, the researcher gets a conclusion: compared with the Grammar-translation Method, the Communicative Language Teaching approach enjoys evident advantages for improving the comprehensive language competence and skills of the students at vocational colleges. Thus, the CLT approach is worth popularizing in English teaching at vocational colleges.