Rethinking The Communicative Language Teaching From The Perspective Of Dialogic Syntax

English,as one of the major international languages,plays an essential role in people's daily life.However,the communicative competence of Chinese English learners has always been less than satisfactory.English as a foreign language(EFL)teaching has had a long history in China,and CLT,a unique teaching approach aiming at strengthening learners' communicative competence,has been widely applied in EFL teaching.But its shortcomings are gradually exposed with its wide application,such as exclusively concern with spoken language,indifference to grammar,lack of a complete syllabus,etc.Up to now,many researches have been carried out from various aspects in order to overcome those shortcomings,but none of them turn out to be a perfect solution to the problems of CLT.Dialogic syntax,a newly coined linguistic theory proposed by Du Bois in 2014,takes language to make language,arguing that language emerges from the interaction of particulars,as one utterance follows another,reproducing its pattern in part(Du Bois,2014,p.359).It encompasses the linguistic,cognitive,and interactional processes involved when speakers selectively reproduce aspects of prior utterances,and when recipients recognize the resulting parallelisms and draw inferences from them.Besides,dialogic syntax places much emphasis on the function of language usage,frequency,contexts and intersubjectivity.As we all know,repeated use and communicative interaction in dynamic contexts play an important part in language acquisition.Accordingly,dialogic syntax may have some implications for EFL teaching.What is more,major concepts and analytic tools of dialogic syntax are parallelism,reproduction,diagraph and resonance,all of which may function a lot in assisting learners to have a better understanding of the syntactic,semantic,and pragmatic functions of certain linguistic elements.Then,learners could apply those linguistic elements in a more accurate fashion in the future,which,doubtlessly,helps learners to promote their communicative competence.Hence,it is feasible to optimize CLT from the perspective of dialogic syntax.In order to achieve the optimization of CLT,the author proposes the Dialogic Syntax-Based CLT,a new teaching approach aiming at assisting learners to acquire language knowledge and achieve their communicative competence by generalizing and creating resonances on different linguistic levels.This study focuses on the following two research questions:1.In what ways can Dialogic Syntax optimize CLT?2.How does Dialogic Syntax–Based CLT assist learners in acquiring language knowledge and achieving their communicative competence?Based on the detailed elaboration and discussion,major findings in this thesis are as follows:First,Dialogic Syntax-Based CLT is beneficial for learners to acquire language knowledge and achieve their communicative competence.Results of the teaching experiment show that almost all the students in the experimental class get a much higher score in the post-test than the pre-test.Second,in the Dialogic Syntax-Based CLT classes,the equal roles of learners and the teacher play an essential part in establishing the harmonious classroom atmosphere.Third,highly contextualized teaching materials can effectively arouse learners' interest.Fourth,Dialogic Syntax-Based CLT contributes to develop learners' ability of generalization.Fifth,compared with CLT,Dialogic Syntax-Based CLT is much more effective in assisting learners to achieve their communicative competence.