Research On Classroom Participation Of Students In English Communicative Teaching

Since the communicative approach began in the late sixties of the last century, many applied linguistsand language teachers started to focus on the cultivation of students’ language communicative competence.As the essence of the communicative approach is language’s social communicative character, Englishcommunicative teaching enables students not only to acquire language knowledge, but also to obtaincommunicative competence. Therefore, the students’ classroom participation becomes the key to developtheir communicative competence in communicative language teaching, however, it often appears theatmosphere of some English classrooms are not active enough, students’ participation is not high,communicative activities are difficult to be carried on and so on in the actual implementation of theEnglish communicative approach. The purpose of the study is to improve the students’ classroomparticipation in English communicative teaching, and then make English classroom communicativeteaching smoothly and effectively carried out and enhance students’ communicative competence. Thestudy provides the current situation, influencing factors and the main promotive strategies about thestudents’ participation of English communicative teaching by questionnaire, classroom observation andinterviews. The questionnaire involves in the investigations about the current situation of the students’participation in English communicative teaching based on the behavior participation, cognitionparticipation and emotion participation and impact factors based on the teacher’s teaching style, student’snon-intelligence, textbook. Classroom observation is adopted to investigate students’ behaviorparticipation in classroom and collect related teaching cases. The interview is for further investigation onthe current situation and impact factors. Basing on the above surveys, the study shows the current situationof the students’ participation in English communicative teaching, and deeply analyses the influencingfactors. Students’ participation is not high, which mainly dues to the communicative teaching process thatis a mechanical and meaningless question-and-answer process. The study proposes the main promotivestrategies to make communicative teaching become a meaningful dialogue process, which can contributeto the improvement of students’ classroom participation and their communicative competence.The thesis is composed of six parts. Part one is the introduction, which provides the background,specific problems, purpose and significance of the study and reviews some related researches. Part twoincludes definition of the students’ participation in English communicative teaching and its characteristicsthat are generation, interaction, openness and integrity. Part three provides the theoretical support frompsychology, education, linguistics. Part four and part five are the crucial parts of the study. Part fouranalyses the current situation and impact factors of the students’ participation in English communicative teaching by questionnaire, classroom observation and interview. Part five puts forward some promotivestrategies to solve the problems by cases in classroom observation. Part six provides the reflection andlimitation of the study.