The Application Of The Communicative Approach In Oral English Teaching In Junior Middle School

English is playing a more and more important role in the society. Therefore, oralEnglish teaching and learning bear considerable social importance. The enhancementof oral proficiency depends on the full development of oral communicativecompetence, because oral communicative competence includes all the mainknowledge of the language use. When all the components of oral communicativecompetence are fully fostered, language learners will speak the language fluently toface the challenges in the future world.The key of oral English teaching of junior middle school is learners’ fulldevelopment of oral communicative competence, which is determined by theteaching goals and the needs of learners. Oral English classes should introduceauthentic materials into the learning process and link classroom language learningwith language usage outside the classroom to compensate the deficiency derivedfrom the traditional teaching models. It should emphasize on learning tocommunicate through interaction in the target language and provide moreopportunities for learners to use the language. Communicative Approach (CA) is thepreferable approach to achieve those goals.CA emphasizes that the goal of language teaching is to develop "communicativecompetence" the ability not only to apply the grammatical rules of a language in orderto form grammatically correct sentences, but also to know when, where and to whomto use these sentences. The crucial part in teaching oral English in the communicativeclassroom is designing communicative activities based on the information-gapprinciple and task-dependency principle. These activities include discussion, role-play,games, drama, etc. Meanwhile，in order to compensate the lack of practice time insideclassroom, some activities should be extended out of classroom such as Englishcontests, debates, English songs and movies etc. Different types of activities will letstudents gain more direct experience with English and make them actively participatein English conversations. These activities trigger their interests to learn English. In order to prove the effect of the Communicative Approach, the author conductsan experiment in two classes in Fengrun No.3Middle School, Tangshan. The twoclasses adopt the traditional teaching approach and Communicative Approachrespectively for comparison. The experiment lasts for four months. The researchgathers sufficient data by means of questionnaire, oral test, interview and classroomexperiment, which indicate that students could make great progress in oralcommunicative competence by taking advantage of CA. The results also show thatstudents make relatively significant improvement in terms of other skills and abilitiessuch as autonomous learning, thinking ability, innovation ability, cooperation withothers, culture awareness, computer skills, speech skills and the abilities to obtaininformation etc.The thesis is composed of six chapters:Chapter One is an introduction, which gives a brief view of the current teachingsituation of oral English in junior middle school. It points out the existing problems injunior middle school oral English teaching. It also analyses the necessity of theresearch. By the end of this chapter, it provides the structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review of related theories. In this chapter, the authorreviews the related studies about Communicative Approach and oral English teachingboth at home and abroad. The requirements of the National English Curriculum injunior middle school oral English teaching are also briefly introduced in this chapter.After explaining the necessity and importance of oral English teaching, the authoranalyses the impact of CA over oral English teaching in junior middle school.Chapter Three is an overview of Communicative Approach. At the beginning, theauthor introduces the definition, characteristics, principles and theoretical foundationof Communicative Approach. Then, the communicative activities are illustratedthrough its designing principles and classifications.Chapter Four gives a detailed explanation about research design, procedure,subjects and instruments etc. The purpose of the current paper is to prove that CA canimprove middle school students’ oral English and help motivate students’ positiveattitude towards English learning. The author gives a detailed description of the experiment and operation procedures. A sample lesson is designed.Chapter Five presents the results of the research and makes an analysis of thecollected data from both Experimental Class and Control Class. Results fromquestionnaires, experiment data of oral tests, feedback from interviews have beensummarized and analyzed. The data analysis sufficiently reveals that after onesemester of experiment, the Experimental Class made significant progress comparedto the Control Class. It is clear that the application of CA can improve students’ oralcommunicative competence to certain extent. By comparing with traditional teachingmethod, CA is feasible and effective in oral English teaching in junior middle school.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis which includes the findings,implication, limitation of the thesis and brief highlight of the research.