Communicative Classroom Activities In English Language Teaching

English, as an international language and a tool of communication in learning advanced science and technology, is playing a vitally important role in leading people on the way to the world. English teaching can equip learners with capacities for effective communication around the world. Teachers of English are encouraged to use the most effective ways for English teaching in the Chinese context.Communication is the essence of English language teaching. The goal of communicative language teaching is to help learners acquire communicative competence. Classroom activities are just the most effective means for learners to achieve this goal. Therefore, it is challenging and crucial for English language teachers to design and carry out communicative classroom activities. However, it seems that some classroom activities in China's middle schools are not communicative or even regarded meaningless. In order to work out what is happening in a communicative English class and what shall be done to make communicative language teaching more appropriate for English teaching in Chinese context, the paper aims at discussing communicative classroom activities which can help students acquire communicative competence. This paper includes five parts:The first part is the introduction to the paper. It briefly introduces the contents and views of the paper.The second part first deals with the nature and features of communicative language teaching, and then defines classroom activities, discusses the important place of communicative classroom activities in language teaching and puts forward the principles that communicative classroom activities should adhere to. The most important feature of communicative language teaching is that communicative competence is the ultimate goal of English language teaching. This goal can be realized through communicative classroom activities that involve the real use of language in daily life. Classroom activity is a central concept for both teachers andstudents because the real success in teaching and learning can be achieved through various kinds of communicative classroom activities.What is following in the third part is the analysis of some major problems in China's middle school English teaching, e.g., the backward teaching methodology focusing on linguistic competence rather than on communicative competence; the teachers' 'spoon-feeding' students; mainly mechanical training classroom activities; meaningless phony communicative activities, which are not for the aim of real communication.The fourth part is about the solutions to the problems through communicative classroom activities to form students' communicative competence. This part puts forward five stages of communicative classroom activities appropriate for Chinese specific teaching contexts (warm-up, presentation, practice, production and feedback activities). In each stage, there is detailed analysis on activity features, place, contexts and useful techniques. A good combination of these five stages of classroom activities is really meaningful and effective because they can help students acquire communicative competence.The last part is the conclusion of the paper. It concludes that these five stages of communicative classroom activities are suitable to Chinese context, which is just a useful attempt of combining communicative language teaching with China's English language teaching. The method can maintain students' motivation, make students learn English in a natural process by creating contexts which support learning. In other words, students are always involved in the real use of English. Thus, students are helped to acquire communicative competence.