A Case Study On The Communicative Activities In The Senior English Class Based-on Turn-taking

The Ministry of Education promulgates New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School in 2003, which makes the specific requirements on the students’ comprehensive competence in English. With the English curriculum reform across the whole country, the classroom communicative activity shows some vitality in English teaching and it is paid attention to by more and more English teachers and scholars. However, the fact is that teachers do not bring the communicative activity into full play in promoting the language output of students in the class. And in the process of carrying out those activities, the rights to speak in class are still controlled by the teachers, the opportunities that students get through free-competition or self-selection are few, the chances for students to speak are unequal and so on. These problems result in the loss of chances for students to use the target language in class. If there is a rational mechanism which can make the turn-taking achieved more effectively and involve more English learners in the interaction, then the communicative activities will be carried out more effectively to improve students’ English proficiency.This research in the paper aims at getting the status quo of the communicative activities in the class from the perspective of turn-taking. And by means of classroom observation and interview, it is designed to reveal the current situations of the turn-taking in the communicative activities and its relevant factors by analyzing the corpus got from what the interlocutors say in the communicative process and the data on the contents of the turn, the ways that the activities are organized and so on. After analysis it is found that there are still some problems in the process of carrying out the communicative activities, such as the type of the communicative activities is single, the turn is controlled by teachers, students shows low enthusiasm in the turn-taking and the techniques for them to use in the turn-taking is limited. therefore it is hoped that by giving teachers and students some suggestions, such as enriching the types of the communicative activities, improving teachers’ questioning or organization modes of the communicative activities and broaden students’ communicative strategies, the effect of the communicative activities can come into play.The paper is divided into six parts:The first chapter is the introduction. It mainly describes the research background, the research questions, the research objectives and the research significance. The second chapter is the literature review, which presents the related concepts on the communicative activities and the relevant studies on the communicative activities which scholars have done at home and abroad. The theoretical foundation includes the theory on the turn-taking and Swain’s output hypothesis, which will be introduced in the third chapter. The next part is about the research design, which describes the research subjects, the research methods which this research applies and how the research will be carried out. The fifth chapter, which can be the most important part of this thesis, is to analyze the corpus in the communicative process to get the status quo of the communicative activities on the basis of turn-taking. And the last chapter makes a summary of the findings of this research according to the main contents of the fifth part and presents some suggestions for teachers and students to improve the teaching and learning in class.