Investigation And Rethinking Of The Application Of Communicative Approach In Language Teaching In Middle Schools

With the fast economic development in China, English language teaching (ELT) is drawing more and more attention and becoming more and more important. In traditional language teaching, it is the teachers who decide everything in class and seek few opinions from students. The students are treated as only followers, waiting to be filled up with knowledge by the teacher. There is little co-operation between the teacher and the students. The students have almost no opportunities to apply what they have learnt to practical communication. It is difficult for students to play their roles fully in this kind of teacher-centered class. That's why the teaching quality in some middle schools is still not high and most of the students fail to communicate with others after learning English for many years.The traditional language teaching methods are no longer to the liking of the English practitioners and the present teaching situation in ELT. As a result, various teaching methods such as Direct method, Audiolingual method and Communicative Approach are introduced into China, among which Communicative Approach is one of the most popular ones. Standards of New National English Curriculum published by the State Education Ministry stipulates: "the objectives of English teaching during the elementary education stage are based on developing students' language skills, language knowledge, emotional attitude, learning strategy and cultural consciousness, to train their abilities of all-round application of the language." Communicative Approach takes the communicative competence as the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching and advocates learning foreign language through communication. It fits in with the needs of the new standards. It focuses on "communicative competence", which is just what the society and the English learners require. But in recent years, if teachers in middle schools in China put the Communicative Approach into practice? The present paper intends to present the result of the investigation on the application of the Communicative Approach in English teaching in middle schools in China and identify the problems therein in an effort to help pave the way for larger scale application of the approach.The main method adopted in the research is questionnaire and classroom...