Communicative Approach In Teaching English In Rural Middle School

The Communicative Approach, namely Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), is a relatively new pedagogical system which originated in the 1970s, developed in the 1980s and has gained considerable currency in the 1990s. It has experienced more than three decades abroad, and has been widely adopted in China for more than ten years , but many researchers and teachers do not know if it is suitable for Chinese rural senior high school students.At present English teaching in rural middle school class is dominated by teacher-centered, grammar-translation. The students have no chance to communicate. Little attention is paid to the training of the students' communicative competence. They are not able to express themselves correctly and freely in English. The traditional teaching method can no longer meet the needs for development in the 21st century when the international exchange has become even more frequent than before. High communicative proficiency is required, which challenges the education system and teaching approach. The traditional "knowledge-oriented" education and "exam-oriented" education restrict the students' creative ability. As a result, adopting CLT in English teaching to improve the students' communicative competence is the better option.The purpose of this study is to explore the efforts of CLT on rural senior high school in China. The paper aims to investigate (1) Can CLT approach improve the rural students' communicative competence and overall abilities? (2) Can CLT approach make the rural middle school class more lively and interesting? (3) Can CLT approach motivate the rural students' to participate more in class?In order to find the answers to the questions, the researcher did a teaching experiment (March, 2004—July,2004).The participants in this research are rural senior high school students of class 1 and class 2, Grade one in Nanzhao No.3 Middle School, Henan Province. They are divided in random, but they have almost the same conditions. The two classes share one teacher who was the researcher. They have the same textbooks, Senior English for China BooklB. The only difference between the two classes is that they are exposed to different teaching approaches. One class is exposed CLT approach and the other the traditional teaching approach.The results from the experiments shows CLT approach can increase the students' motivation, and improve their spoken English proficiency, communicative abilities and overall abilities. It is feasible to apply CLT approach in rural middle school in China.