The Application Of Communicative Approach In High School English Teaching

The Communicative Approach was first put forward in the 1970s, reached its peak and was introduced into our country in the mid-eighties. Since 1995, our high school English teaching has witnessed 3 reforms, which established the Communicative Approach's leading position in our teaching step by step. The New Criteria for English Syllabus in Common High School, issued in the year 2004, made it clear that in the course of implementing the programs, "to change the way of teaching, an important measure is to adopt a student-centered teaching method instead of teacher-centered teaching methods, and to introduce a classroom mode by which students will explore knowledge and develop their language capacity on their own initiative. Under this guidance, the Communicative Approach is considered the most suitable teaching method. The application of this approach makes a difference in our classroom, in which the explanation of language grammar points is ignored while the training of communicative competence is emphasized. This paper firstly introduces the approach, its theories and characteristics. And it is argued that the Communicative Approach is more effective than the traditional approaches in arousing students' interest and initiative in learning English. It is also maintained that that the students' communicative competence can be trained more effectively. However, the Communicative Approach has been encountering lots of difficulties in our classroom. The paper copes with the misunderstanding and difficulties so that we can apply this teaching approach more effectively and practically.