The Situations And Countermeasures Of Clt Application In Teaching English At Middle School Level In Shanghai

Along the progress of international communication and cooperation, ability offoreign languages (FL) is becoming a crucial skill in modern society gradually. Due tothe growing interest towards language skills, FL Teaching and Teaching Methodologyhave been paid great attention in many countries.Affected by theory of Comparative Grammar and that of Language Transfer,Grammar-translation Method, a traditional method of language teaching, aimed atestablishing the framework of FL linguistic rules. It stressed on learners’ reading andwriting skills while ignored their abilities in listening and speaking. Contrastively,Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) sees its objective as improvement ofstudents’ communicative competence, i.e., students are expected to performinterpersonal communication and exchange in real life situations with the spokenform of the target FL. This demand is also consistent with the basic viewpoint that"language is mainly spoken" in modern linguistics.This thesis firstly reviews the main stages of FL teaching methodology. Then itintroduces the CLT from several aspects: theoretical background, organizational formof teaching sessions, and its intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. On the basis of thesefindings, a questionnaire and some interviews are employed to describe the presentsituations of applying CLT to English teaching practices at middle school level inShanghai. At last, several difficulties are pointed out in CLT application that occurredin the last two decades; at the same time, a few tentative countermeasures areproposed to maximize the possible benefits brought by CLT.