Application Of The Discourse-based Communicative Approach In The Course Of Intensive Reading

It is widely acknowledged that the course of Intensive Reading (also known asComprehensive English) is one of the key courses for students majored in English atthe tertiary level in China. It plays an important role in training the basic skills and theacademic aptitude of the students. In order to realize the previous targets, a greatamount of colleges and universities have devoted lots of qualified teachers and time tothis course. However, the effect is far from satisfactory. In the traditional teaching ofIntensive Reading, teachers emphasize language forms but neglect language use.Furthermore, vocabulary and grammar items usually take precedence over the overallmeaning of a discourse. As a result, students are structurally competent butcommunicatively incompetent. Although they have received nearly ten years of formalEnglish teaching, they are frequently remain deficient in the actual use of the language.All these problems indicate that the traditional method of teaching can not meet theincreasing communicative demands. Therefore, it is urgent and essential for teachers toadopt an applicable method to help students improve their communicative competence.Among the various methodologies, the Communicative Approach has been one ofthe most inspiring. It sets communicative competence as its teaching goal, interactionand communication as its kernel. Furthermore, it highlights language use, which is animprovement and transcendence of the traditional teaching mode. In addition, theDiscourse-based Teaching emphasizes not only the inference of discourse meaningwith various language skills according to the context, but also the mastery of language points based on the skills. To some extent, the Discourse-based Teaching is thecompensation of the traditional teaching method for the over-explanation on words andsentences. For these reasons, what the Communicative Approach and theDiscourse-based Teaching advocate are of great reference value to the teaching ofIntensive Reading.Based on the review of the Communicative Approach, the Grammar-TranslationMethod, the Discourse-based Teaching and the analysis of the empirical study, thisdissertation advocates combining the Communicative Approach and theDiscourse-based Teaching, that is, adopting the Discourse-based CommunicativeApproach in the course of Intensive Reading to achieve the teaching goal of improvingthe students' communicative competence. In order to link theories to practice, ademonstration lesson is provided at last.