Chapter OneIntroduction

The appearance of the communicative language teaching, short for CLT, is arevolution in the history of the development of the foreign language teaching. It changesthe teacher-centered education of the traditional foreign language teaching into the realstudents-centered education. Teachers won’t play a role of knowledge passer all the timein class any longer but a role of students’ learning facilitator and communicativeactivities organizer. And students won’t play just a role of knowledge acceptor andnote-taker any longer but a role of learning initiator and class participant. It changes thewhole atmosphere of the traditional foreign language teaching, in which, teachers arebusy with grammar rules and language points showing that they think students mustgrasp with a teaching idea that the more teachers teach, the more students will get.Because of teacher’s talk taking up too much time in class, less time will be left tostudents to think and participate into the class. The only thing that students need to do isto listen to teachers and take notes. Such classes become dull and uninteresting, whichkill students’ learning interests and motivation. In the period of the senior high, moststudents learn English with an instrumental motivation, say, for getting into theirdreaming universities, but not simply for their likes. In CLT, students must learn byparticipating into the whole classes and makes them become the real learning doers,which can activate the atmosphere so that students won’t learn under a dull anduninteresting conditions and also can motivate students to learn English initiatively. Itchanges the teaching aim of the foreign language teaching. CLT claims that learningEnglish by using it. Developing students’ communicative competence becomes the aimof the foreign language teaching. The people who support the traditional foreignlanguage think that only the systematic grammar learning adding to enough languagepoints accumulating can help language learners to use the target language better.However, too much emphasis on grammar learning and language points introductionmake teachers overlook the practice of using, which lead to the appearance of ‘highscores and low abilities’ and ‘the dumb English’. Precisely, the appearance of the CLTcan make up the shortages of the traditional foreign language teaching.

Nowadays, CLT has been welcomed warmly by Chinese world of education. Onone hand, the textbooks used by senior high students are designed based on the teachingideas of CLT. Students’ Book of New Standard English which is used by studentswidely in a lot of big cities like Chengdu can be used as an example. The contents of thetextbook are divided into four parts, namely, reading, speaking, listening and writing.Except structural grammatical knowledge introduction, the part of the function oflanguage is added to the contents of every module. Pronunciation is also an importantpart which is stressed to practice students’ speaking skills. The orders mentioned in thecontents suggest that more communication should be arranged in class. For example,there is an item as follows: Discuss these questions. 1 what do you think of the ticketsinspector’s attitude? 2 What expressions could be used to change it? From the examplewe can see that the textbook stresses more on the interaction with teacher and studentsor students and students, furthermore, more on the use of sentences rather than theusage of sentences. Lastly, the contents of the textbook are more close to people’s life.On the other hand, some English teachers who support the CLT are using it in theirteaching. In the period of having class, teachers will arrange some communicativeactivities and interact with students purposely more than before. However, the effect ofthe application in senior high is less than satisfactory.

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Chapter TwoLiterature Review

2. 1 The Previous Study of CLT

After CLT was introduced into China, it was translated into＂交际法＂in Chinese,which was accepted widely. In China, there are a great number of English teachers whohave some misunderstandings of CLT. They mix the ‘approach’ in CLT with the‘methods’ in some other traditional foreign language teaching approaches together, like,the Audio-lingual method, the traditional grammar translation method and so on and soforth. In other words, they wrongly treat the CLT as a teaching method. As a matter offact, CLT is a teaching idea or a teaching syllabus which reflects a teaching principlebut not a teaching method. A teaching method is designed based on a teaching idea andreflects its teaching idea at the same time. There is no specific communicative teachingmethod exists in the world. Only the designed communicative teaching method canreflect its communicative teaching ideas, it can be called a communicative teachingmethod. A teaching idea can be used to direct its teaching method. All the people callingthe CLT as “the notional approach”, “the functional approach” or “thefunctional-notional approach” (Huang Taisquan) have the same mistake- having somemisconceptions of the CLT.

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2. 2 The Theoretic Grounds of CLT

The formation of every teaching approach must have its special social andeconomic backgrounds and also have its theoretical backgrounds. The same is true ofCLT. The goal of Communicative Language Teaching is to develop language learners’communicative competence which is coined by Hymes. He develops it from Chomsky’stheory of competence. According to Chomsky:Linguistic theories is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in acompletely homogenous speech community, who knows its language perfectly andis unaffected by such grammatical irrelevant conditions as memories limitation,distractions, shifts of attentions and interest, and errors( random and characteristic)in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.(3)For Chomsky, the focus of linguistic theory is to study the abstract abilities that enablespeakers to produce grammatical correct sentences in a language. These abilities comefrom the so-called Universal grammar. However, Hymes holds differently on this aspect.He thinks that linguistic theory needs to be seen as a part of a more general theory incorporating communication and culture. In Hymes’ communicative competencetheory, he terms it as what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicativelycompetent in a speech community. In his eyes, he thinks that a person who acquirescommunicative competence needs to know: 1 whether ( and to what degree ) somethingis formally possible; 2 whether ( and to what degree ) something is feasible in virtue ofthe meanings of implementation available; 3 whether ( and to what degree ) somethingis appropriate( adequate, happy, successful ) in relation to a context in which it is usedand evaluated; 4 whether ( and to what degree ) something is in fact done, actuallyperformed, and what its doing entails.( 281)

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Chapter Three Findings and Discussion ........17

3. 1 The Problems in Using CLT ........17

3. 2 Students’ Attitudes and Needs........25

3. 2. 1 Students’ Attitudes .........25

3. 2. 3 Students’ Needs ........26

Chapter Four Teaching Implication ........27

4. 1 Suggestions to Teachers........27

4. 1. 1 Updating Teacher’s Teaching Ideas ....... 27

4. 1. 2 Fluency Prior to Accuracy ......... 27

4. 1. 3 Correct Realization of Teacher’s roles......... 28

4. 1. 4 Good Dealing with Communicative Activities........ 29

4. 1. 5 Using CLT Together with Grammar Teaching......... 29

4. 2 Suggestions to Students ........30

4. 2. 1 An Active Part in the Communicative Activities. .... 30

4. 2. 2 Making Full Use of the Outside School Hours........ 31

Chapter FourTeaching Implication

4. 1 Suggestions to Teachers

According to the survey, currently, many teachers are using CLT under thedirection of some old teaching ideas like, grammar learning - the basic step for foreignlanguage learning, students’ scores – the most important norm to evaluate teacher’steaching, which are contradictory with what CLT claims. These who insist to use thetraditional foreign language teaching methods and keep the traditional and old teachingideas doubt that the pure CLT can’t ensure students’ good scores on one hand. On theother hand, they also believe that CLT really have advantages that we can absorb. Inorder to use CLT well in the practical teaching, teachers must have some teaching ideaswhich is suitable to CLT and abandon those traditional and old teaching ideas. Thesewho have these old teaching ideas wrongly hold that high scores equal with high skills.CLT claims to develop students’ communicative competence by using it, so languageskills are more important than high scores. A student with high scores uncertainly hashigh language skills. On the contrary, a student with high language skills can get highscores.

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Conclusion

Since CLT came into china, Chinese researchers have held different ideas in termsof it. Some of them agree with it for discovering its advantages, hoping to use it to makeup the disadvantages of the traditional language teaching approach. The problemsbrought by the traditional language teaching approach make people full of hope to thiscompletely new teaching approach. Developing students’ communicative competence iswhat the Chinese foreign language teaching needs because of the special nationalsituation of China. The application of the CLT faces great troubles. Grammar teaching isthe key one in these troubles. The CLT stressing on functions of sentences determinesthat it is different from grammar teaching. Grammar teaching holds that teachers showstudents grammar rules directly, so a single sentence can reflect grammar rules.However, to reflect the functions of a sentence, we must be put this sentence into acontext discourse. From this point some researchers think the CLT contradicts with thetraditional methods, so they keep a doubting attitude towards the CLT. Actually anyteaching approach has its advantages and disadvantages. A same teaching approach hasdifferent advantages and disadvantages under different national situations. We can’tabandon a teaching approach completely just because of its disadvantages and we alsocan’t accept it blindly just because of its advantage.

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