A Study On The Application Of Communicative Language Teaching Approach To Spoken Tourism English Teaching

As the process of the economic globalization speeds up stage by stage, China hasparticipated in international events more and more. Tourism industry in China, thus, has alsobecome more and more important in economic and cultural industry. However, the lack of thetalents with communicative competence in foreign spoken languages, especially in English hasrestricted the development of the tourism industry in China. Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) approach which came into existence in1970s is a school of foreign language teachingwhich has greater influence in the world. The practical, effective teaching approach has broughtabout the application in Tourism English course. In China, the research on CommunicativeLanguage Teaching mainly aims at English teaching in English majors and English teaching innon-English majors, but its application to the English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching isrelatively less, and also the research on spoken tourism English teaching is much less. Therefore,the paper preliminarily attempts to combine the theory of Communicative Language Teachingwith spoken tourism English teaching so as to search for a feasible and effective approach whichconforms to the teaching features of spoken tourism English. The research methods of this paperare literature review, experimental research, interview and questionnaire.This research aims at the application of CLT to spoken tourism English teaching. The authorof the research chooses two classes of Grade two from Tourism Management majors fromCollege of Tourism in Bohai University. One is the experimental group (EG), and the other is thecontrol group (CG). The experimental group takes CLT method, and control group takestraditional PPP method. There are two research questions in this paper: Compared with thetraditional teaching approach,(1) whether Communicative Language Teaching approach canimprove the students’ interest in learning spoken tourism English;(2) whetherCommunicative Language Teaching approach is more effective to improve the students’ level ofspoken tourism English.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One, Introduction, describes the background,purpose and significance of the research. Chapter Two, Literature review, describes the relevanttheory of the Communicative Language Teaching, the features of the spoken tourism Englishteaching, the latest research on CLT both in China and abroad. The author also introduced theBachman’s theory of communicative competence in detail. Chapter Three, Empirical research,describes the oral test standards, test methods and steps of the experiment in detail. Chapter Four,Data analysis, analyzes the experimental data detailed. Chapter Five, Conclusion, comes to theconclusion based on the analysis of experimental data.The experimental results show that: In spoken tourism English teaching, compared with the traditional approach, Communicative Language Teaching can encourage the students to preferlearning spoken tourism English; Communicative Language Teaching is more effective toimprove the students’ spoken tourism English.