Study On Practice Of Communicative Approach In English Listening And Speaking Teaching In Independent Colleges

Communicative ability is the chief and ultimate goal of a language, so English language teaching should aim to cultivate students’ English communicative competence. The ability of listening and speaking is of the great significance in English communication. Therefore, modern English teaching requires teachers to put more emphasis on cultivating students’ listening and speaking comprehension. Low grades in College Entrance Examination show that students in independent colleges usually are poor in listening and speaking, which greatly influences their future job hunting or further study. In order to alter these situation and cultivate students’ communicative ability, priority should be given to the teaching of listening and speaking. However, the current teaching is exam-oriented. So as to fully motivate students, the present teaching model and patterns in English should be adjusted. Thus, it seems very necessary to apply communicative approach to the English teaching of listening and speaking in the independent colleges.After analyzing the current situation, the necessity and feasibility in English teaching in independent colleges, the paper turns to describe how to carry out the research. Based on the relative theories, the author tries to find out a best solution to improve the students’ listening and speaking ability in independent colleges. Therefore, the communicative approach, which advocates the learning to use a language and using a language to learn, is adopted in the reform of listening and speaking teaching. The author would like to take a year to carry out the research to testify the improvement of students’communicative ability. During that, three tests are employed to measure students English listening and speaking proficiency, and two questionnaires are carried out to understand students’ attitudes towards English teaching in independent colleges. Meanwhile, the author employed the interviews and class observation. After the author gathered the results of the tests, SPSS 19.0 is applied to carry out the standard deviation and standard error mean of the two classes in order to make the comparison and analysis.Although it is not the sole mode for English teaching, the research shows that communicative approach does have the positive effect on improving students’ communicative ability. From the results of tests, it can be seen that the average score of students in experimental class increases by about 21.82%, on the contrary, that is just 1.22% in controlled class, which is the direct way to prove that students’ communicative ability can be enhanced with the help of communicative approach. It is obvious that students in experimental class are more interested in English learning. The students participating in the interviews also show their great interests in communicative approach. Most of students begin to like learning English because their interest has been greatly motivated. However, communicative approach is not almighty, there are still some problems existing. Furthermore, due to the limitations of objects, time and staff, this research can not reflect all the aspects of the situations and problems in different independent colleges. Although this practice is of a great success to a certain degree, it still needs further study. After putting forward implications, it is strongly recommended that more studies should be done in this field with some suggestions given in this thesis.