A Study Of Communicative And Context Approach To English Teaching In Junior High School

Language is a means of communication.Language teaching aims to help students develop their communicative competence.In spite of the obvious progress in China's English teaching,its further development remains restrained by traditional approaches which have dominated our English teaching for a long time.It is still the fact that students are always performing comparatively better in assessments than in authentic,which is named “dumb English”.It is somewhat reasonable to say that traditional approaches to English teaching are far from the requirements of current situations and how to promote students' communicative competence becomes a crucial task for all,especially,for teachers of the English language.In the 1990 s,Communicative and Context Language Teaching(CCLT)was introduced into China,but it has not gained its desired effects so far.The CCLT emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language.It includes classroom activities,such as role-play,interviews,games,language exchanges,surveys,and pair work.However,most of the Chinese students are reluctant to communicate with others in English.Thus,a paradox appears: though students could get excellent marks in exams,it is difficult for them to deliver their ideas freely and to communicate with others in English appropriately.Research on communicative approach to English teaching in junior high school is not much satisfactory.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the following research questions: 1.Can communicative English teaching help to promote students' communicative competence? 2.What are the obstacles in application of the CCLT in China's context? 3.How to effectively integrate communicative and context approach with traditional approach? The author tries to explore a relatively effective path for English teaching and learning.The thesis consists of five chapters.As the introductory part,Chapter 1 presents research background,rationale,objectives and research questions,significance of the study together the thesis outline.Chapter 2 discusses the features and differences of traditional English teaching approach(audio-lingual and grammar-translation approach)and communicative language teaching approach together with a brief review of related studies.An introduction of research methodology and procedures is presented in chapter 3,which mainly depicts the process how the CCLT is carried out in the present study.Chapter 4 covers data analysis with questionnaires and survey,and by some experiments of CCLT in the practical teaching junior middle school students.Chapter 5 concludes the major findings,the limitations of the research as well as the suggestions for future researches.