Communicative Approach And High School English Teaching

Communicative approach is also called Functional approach or Notional approach. It is based on the linguist Hymes and Halliday's theory in the 1970's century. It is one of the most influential foreign language teaching methods. However, just as Professor Wang Zongyan points out: We shouldn't only read the foreign books, but we should also look back at our own country's condition and experiment with the things that we learn from abroad and prove them, correct them and complement them. This study tries to do that in this area.For many years, the traditional Sentence-Text-Analysis method has been used in high school English teaching. As a result, the students who have learned several years of formal English often remain deficient in using the language in real communication situations. So we need a new approach to language teaching which will change the emphasis of attention from the linguistic forms to communicative competence. That is, teaching a foreign language should involve a great deal more than teaching the literal meaning of words.At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1970s, the rise of socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, the theory of communicative approach, etc, started a revolution in the field of linguistics. Many linguists began to view language not only in terms of structures, but also communicative functions that it performs. The shift of emphasis in the aim of linguistics study has exerted a great influence on language teaching, and finally it leads to a new approach in language teaching. The teaching goal of Communicative Language Teaching Approach is to train and develop students' linguistic competence and their communicative competence.What are then the characteristic features of the new approach? Will all the past problems in high school English teaching be solved with this approach?This paper deals with the theoretical background of communicative approach, with an emphasis on studying its effect on high school English teachers, the characteristics of teaching activities, and the teaching principles. It also proposes some practical methods of implementing communicative approach in high school English teaching in China.Finally, The paper points out that the teacher should help the students realize the fact that the English language is indeed dynamic rather than static, depending on their continuing effectiveness and ability to adapt and modify according to the demands of the times, different students, different styles of the teachers and the different environment of the teaching. Communicative approach is not the only effective way to improve oral English, other approaches shall also be applied.Through the study of communicative teaching approach, we can make our effort to find one or more than one road which can meet the needs for teaching and learning English specific to China's situation.