The Application Of Communicative Languge Teaching In Non-English Major’s Intensive Reading Class

Language is a tool for communication among people, so as English. With therapidly globalization of the world, communications between countries and exchangesbetween districts are becoming more and more frequently. English has been widelyapplied in every aspect of international affairs, both in business and culture for it hasbecome the most important information carrier. According to this, English teachingand learning has naturally becoming more and more fashionable and popularizing incitizen’s quality education.Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach to the teaching ofsecond language and foreign language that emphasizes interaction as both the meansand the ultimate goal of learning a language. H.G. Widdowson once claimed that theultimate goal in language learning is to acquire communicative competence andcommunicative abilities embrace linguistic skills, which refer to those skills asspeaking, hearing, composing and comprehending (H. G. Widdowson).The notion ofCLT was originated in the late1960s as a replacement of the Situation LanguageTeaching. Under the circumstance of the decline of situational language teaching, theinterdependence of European countries, the urgent need for great effort to teach adultsthe major language of the European common market, CLT was come into being. Thegoal of Communicative Language Teaching is to develop students’ communicativecompetence, which includes both the knowledge about the language and theknowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations.Intensive Reading is a comprehensive course in College English. Every studentand teacher knows that in this course they should grasp the skills such as listening,speaking, reading, writing and translation within a time limited class. Ostensibly theyare simply separated, but essentially they are closely related to each other. So it isimportant for the students to develop their ability to use English in an all-round way,so that in the future work and social interactions they would able to exchangeinformation with others effectively and enhance their self-study ability. Without adoubt, as teachers they should make a great effort on fostering student communicativecompetence. Actually, this is a daunting task. In China, the traditional English classeswere teacher-oriented, most of the students were just sitting there and taking notes,they lack of motivation and initiative to English learning. Occasionally, a smallnumber of students participate in class activities.This dissertation is an empirical one which is conducted to apply CLT in collegeIntensive Reading Class, and to motivate students’ English learning enthusiasm. Thenthrough explore the result of application of CLT from the perspective of Non-Englishmajors with a teaching-testing experiment in college English teaching. The authorattempts to prove that the application of CLT in Intensive Reading Class could made apositive function on enhance the communication competence of students in somerespects.This research is conducted in AUAF (Aviation University of Air Force), in which the102non-English major students are selected as the research subjects. Among themtwo classes (50students) are belong to the control group, and the other two classes(52students) are belong to the experiment group. The CLT treatment starts after thepre-experiments test and questionnaire, totally there are40academic hours areinvolved. In the intensive reading class, for the control group, the instructor chieflyconducts the traditional teaching approach in the teaching process. The teacher andstudents were made great efforts on the accumulation and explanation of words andphrases and the analysis of complex sentence patterns. Conversely, in the experimentgroup, the student not only needs to acquire the linguistic knowledge, such asvocabulary and sentence patterns, but also needs to put it into practice. They shouldknow how to use it freely in their daily life while communicative with others. Ofcourse, after a semester’s treatment a post-experiment test and a face to face talkingwould carry out for the verification of the effectiveness of the experiment. And all thedata are collected, in order to examine the result accurately and answer the researchquestion properly, some statistics analysis from the perspective of quantity and qualityare conducted.The research result demonstrated that the application of CLT in College IntensiveReading Class has made English teaching effective and meaningful and positivelyimproved the student communicative competence. It is an effective teaching approachin enhancing student’s all-round ability. The result of the experiment shows theanswers to questions that have been put forward at the beginning of the thesis: first,what is the current situation of Intensive Reading in Chinese college English teaching;second, whether the application of Communicative Language Teaching in collegeEnglish teaching can improve students’ communication competence positively. Theresults show that the students in EG (experiment group) achieved higher scores thanstudents in CG (control group).In conclusion, this research on the application of CLT in College IntensiveReading Class is based on experiments and theories. To some extent, it successfullysolved the questions that mentioned in this thesis, but due to some unavoidable factorsthat exist, this thesis surely still has some weaknesses and limitations. All in all, theapplication of CLT in College Intensive Reading Class deserves further investigation.