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Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN 1539-8072 March 2012, Vol. 9, No. 3, 996-1004

DAVID

PUBLISHING

A Summary About Practice of Communicative Approach in Real College English Teaching ZHANG Li University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China 

It has been acknowledged by Chinese educators that in teaching English as a second language the center should be put on the improvement of students’ communicative competence. Communicative approach in teaching English as a second language in China has been accepted as one of the most effective ways of classroom teaching. Based on Hymes’ theories of communicative competence, the author summarizes personal experiences and practice of the teaching method by examples and concludes that the communicative approach is very effective and helpful for students. Keywords: communicative competence, communicative approach, second language teaching, interaction

The Traditional Chinese Approach in Language Teaching The traditional mode of teaching English as a foreign language to native Chinese students, being characterized by stereotyped monotonousness in teachers’ conducting classes, duck-feeding way in interaction with students, and teachers’ blackboard writing accompanying students’ note-taking, has been challenged, denied and renovated into many new ideas about improving foreign language teaching. Time has changed and the teaching method should be the same no more. The road for the old-fashioned, “teacher-centered” way of teaching is sure to diminish for the following several reasons: Firstly, the college students, the new generations growing up in the globalization and computerization environment, being exposed to ever-changing and ever-expanding information, give no assent to the old way. They ask for more participation and more practicality in English learning. Secondly, with the development of information age, the multimode of both teaching methods and teaching facilities provide plenty objective conditions for this change. Thirdly, the feedback from the employing units that value the usage of English language more opens a new door to the researchers who come to realize the significance of colloquial and listening abilities besides reading and writing. Take the USST (University of Shanghai for Science and Technology) for example, in the writer’s personal experience in teaching English language for students majoring in arts, through careful comparison and thorough analysis, the author notices a sharp increase in the students’ interest and will to demonstrate themselves in classroom activities and a noticeable decrease in the main students’ keeping silence in class. 

Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the project “The Research on the Feasibility of Content-based ESP Courses in Universities of Science and Technology” sponsored by Social Science Fund of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (Research Grant No. 11XSY 23). ZHANG Li, lecturer, Foreign Languages School, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology.

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In general, the traditional way of teaching is no longer suitable for new times. And educators do various explorations and trials about different approaches in teaching.

The Communicative Approach in Language Teaching Through years of experience, the author finds the communicative approach in teaching English as a foreign language to be desirable and effective. Put forward firstly in 1972 by Dell Hymes in the article “On Communicative Competence”, the notion of communicative competence brings a revolution to linguistics. The notion of communicative competence is the basic theory from which the teaching approach using communicative ways is developed. Hymes (1972) defined communicative competence as “a knowledge of the rules for understanding and producing both the referential and social meaning of language” (p. 338). According to Hymes, the rules of grammar are based on the rules of use. He viewed communicative competence as grammatical, psycholinguistic, sociocultural, and probabilistic systems of competence. In 1979, Hymes elaborated the four aspects of a language learner’s communicative competence, namely, grammaticality, feasibility, appropriateness, and performance. Grammaticality means the learner knows whether or not something is grammatically correct, or, whether something is possible and acceptable in form. Feasibility means that the learner knows whether something is feasible or not; that is, whether something is understandable to human beings. If something is feasible, the learner also knows the degree to which something is feasible. Appropriateness means the learner knows whether something is conforming to certain social norms and whether it is suitable to be used in certain kind of social context. Performance means the learner knows whether or not something is in fact done in reality and the degree of performance. Hymes is not the only researcher in this area. There are other scholars developing ideas about communicative approach. In 1980, Canale and Swain made the definition of communicative competence. They put it into the following three components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980). Grammatical competence means the speaker should learn about the words and grammatical rules about the language. Sociolinguistic competence means the speaker pays attention to the appropriateness of language usage, knowing how to use the language in an appropriate way. Strategic competence means that the speaker has the appropriate use of communication strategies in order to communicate successfully. More recently in 1990, Bachman made a survey about communicative competence and divided it into organizational competence and pragmatic competence. The former means the speaker should have both grammatical and discourse or textual competence and the latter includes sociolinguistic and illocutionary competence. The goal of language education is to improve communicative competence. Classroom practice is a good way to perform the goal. The traditional idea is that the central role of a classroom learning is to give priority to grammar learning. But now it has become widely accepted and acknowledged that the notion of communicative competence has more dominant position in language learning and the main purpose for English teaching is to cultivate students’ communicative skills by using English language. Communicative approach in teaching focuses on enhancing students’ language proficiency by using real and idiomatic language materials and advocating sentence practicing plus plot performing and encouraging students to have more access to using English. Hymes’ original idea was like this: A speaker has to master more than grammatical knowledge to communicate in an effective way in a language. In order to complete one’s own purposes of speaking tasks, a

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speaker needs to know the way how the language is used by other members of a speech community. So from the pragmatic aspects, communicative competence is related to functions of the language, the variations of the language, and interaction skills and cultural framework.

The Roles of the Teacher and the Students Let us take the students majoring in arts for example, the teacher should use ways to make happen the students communicating with each other in class. The students working in pairs, or groups more than three, communication in mind, emotions, and ideas thus to influence each other is the core of this teaching approach. The teacher’s task is to create all kinds of opportunities for the students to demonstrate and present themselves. Many teachers have succeeded in discussing the theories as well as the practice of communicative approach. The author for this paper combines research with realistic experiences in teaching in order to plan for a better teaching method that is both scientific and conforming to reality. The writer uses the following teaching methods in real teaching activities. Questions and Answers—The Interaction Between the Teacher and the Students The teacher will ask the students questions, adopting the direct form of interaction between the students and the teacher. The teacher encourages the students to think about the problem and express their own ideas. By designing different questions, the teacher leads the students to think about the matter. For example, in explaining a text with the topic Love, the teacher asks the students the following question: “Have you ever been in love?”. Then put one student to answer the question. The teacher can lead the student to express more ideas about his/her love experience (If he/she is open about his/her own private life), his/her criteria in selecting a life partner, and the reasons why he/she makes that choice. The main purpose is to provide the student a language environment to practice English. As the topic is very simple and light, the student may feel free to speak out their opinions. At this time, the teacher moves on to next student, asking him/her whether he/she agrees with the first student. So it is his/her turn to supplement what the first student has said. So the form of English class is changed into a mode with the students functioning as the center, the teacher playing the supporting and guiding role. This approach makes us realize the importance of communicative purposes of employing a foreign language. The Multimodality Way the Students Used to Complete the Assignments The teacher gives the students full option to exert their creative abilities who employ various ways including both audio and video to achieve better communicative effects. The English class has advanced to a certain degree where students use their sound recording clip as background voice in PowerPoint presentation assignments. Multimedia are used in interaction. They use cell phone to record their sound and cameras to make short movies about discussion, design a play by themselves, and play the roles by team work. Some students go so far as to make personal recorded voices into animated in order to achieve better effects. In this way learning English becomes a platform for the students to have all kinds of activities. They feel no monotonousness and dullness in class. They communicate with each other and learn from each other in different ways of thinking and different angles of looking at and dealing with problems and in this learning process; they can lose no character and unique feature for personal growth.

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The Mode of Student-Student Interaction After knowing the good effects of communication, the students find learning English interesting and full of variety. You do not know what happens next minute in class. It is full of change and free fluids of ideas. The students start to interact with each other. Some students coming to the front to perform a task will involve the rest of the class into their own report or speech, by asking questions or asking for assistance, thus building a mode of inter-student communication, replacing the former teacher-student pattern in interchanging. This shows the students, as recipients for second language learning, start to think about their roles in class. To them it is more practice to use fluently the language so that it does good to the futural career than receiving knowledge passively. This confirms completely to Hymes’ theory that a learner has the competence to select the suitable language materials for himself/herself and to know the kind of situations that are appropriate for his/her language practice. The Change of Teacher’s Role in Class Under such circumstances there is a great change about the teacher’s role and responsibility. Formerly, as the center of the English class, the teacher is mainly responsible for explaining the language details and grammatical points, conveying the English knowledge sound and safe to the students, making them study the language points and do exercises to improve the English level, and interacting with students more by questions based on text context with main purpose to understand the text itself than on materials outside or related to text with purpose to provoke the thinking modes and to improve colloquial abilities of the student with less focus on grammatical correctness and word meanings. Why do the teachers undergo such great change in class roles? The world has become one big village through globalization. In modern times people are more open in ideas. It is more and more difficult to confine people’s ideas. The same is true with the students. The students, exposing to the Internet, a tool you can use to search for any academic information, have to adjust themselves to the present fast-developing scientific world of knowledge. If they do not behave actively in receiving all kinds of information, they will be backward in no time. It is no other choice for them. Hymes thinks communicative competence has relation to social and cultural background and need. And that is very true about today’s students. With English dictionaries embedded in cell phones, electronic learning equipments, the latest portable computers becoming smaller and smaller, etc., learning new words and language points poses no problem for the students. Since they can find the many substitutes to traditional dictionary in paper and book form, they have access to “walking encyclopedia” everywhere. What matters now is not on the words and phrases to learn, which the students can deal with quite efficiently after class, as anyway they should not cease to learn the numerous ever-increasing knowledge in information age, but on the communication and practice of the language so that they are sure to have abilities to use the language well. The Significance of Teacher’s Role in Class But still the teacher’s role is indispensable. Its importance lies in the fact that now the teacher guides and leads and directs the students in discussions, speeches, role plays, and other class activities, making sure they will not divagate too much from the topic and summarizing the students’ points of view whenever suitably. Otherwise, the class will be badly organized and the communicative purpose of the class will fail just the same as the students participate too little.

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The Meaning of Classroom Interaction for the Students Hymes thinks that a person’s communicative competence not only includes the grammar knowledge and language proficiency but also means the judgment the learner makes in psychology. By participation, the students will become fond of English language learning gradually. The fear towards learning a second language and the sense of frustration will disappear. Working in pairs, groups, large or small, and teams of all kinds, with good preparation beforehand, the students build up confidence in language learning.

Mode of Communicative Approach in Teaching The teaching mode can be based on tasks in communicative approach. Different tasks are designed either by the teacher or by the students themselves. Whatever the form, the students function as the main body in class. The concrete examples are the imitation of dialogues from videos, the performing of roles in stories related to text information, and the group discussion in any creative form that may come from the students themselves. For example, the students will come out with such a good idea as to shoot videos when they make discussion after class on topics from the teacher. In class, they report to the whole class what they have made and present the video as evidence of their extracurricular activities. The rest of the students are impressed by their creative idea. Students finish tasks using various means in deliver ideas to achieve the most desirable communicative effects. The following short video clips, for one thing, lead the speakers’ communication with the other students as audiences who are attracted and impressed by the content of them. And the speakers all use the videos to achieve some definite purpose to confirm their ideas. For example, a student used a video clip to account for his topic about the image of a teacher. Here is a picture from the video coming from the film Bad Teacher by Cameron Diaz (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The teacher coming to the classroom.

Next one is a picture from a video used by the student from a cartoon movie (see Figure 2). The student used this clip to discuss the topic about courage.

Figure 2. Clip from the cartoon movie Rio.

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The following is a graph from another video used by the student in his presentation work in class, the advertisement downloaded from Internet named Snow-white for Seven-up. It is very comic as to the effect of being played in class (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Picture clip of an ad video from the Internet.

For another example, a student made a video in introducing the famous American writer Hemingway. Here is one of the pictures used in his presentations (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. A picture in introduction of Hemingway and his life.

Students use personal drawing, designing, and pictures in PowerPoint presentations. This adoption of multimedia will achieve great audio and visual effect. Figure 5 to Figure 9 are examples of page clips from the powerpoint presentation made by the students.

Figure 5. A picture added into the presentation.

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Figure 6. Explanation of the text by a student.

Figure 7. The outlines of the boy and the girl being drawn by the student.

Figure 8. The designing of black and white effect.

Figure 9. The artistic effect for the words used.

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From these figures, we know about the different methods and techniques students use in their PowerPoint pages. In Figure 5, a picture downloaded from the Internet is used. Figure 6 is a page example in a student’s work explaining the text from bilingual angles. In Figure 7, the picture drawn turns out to be the original work from the student and the black and white style is also a design work by the student personally as shown in Figure 8. Finally, Figure 9 tells us about the artistic effect used by the student for better presentation about the discussion topic. These assignments with colorful personal attributes and features give the students feelings of satisfaction and sense of achievement in class. With less worries and anxieties, they find good ways to learn and they take part in it. Towards all kinds of activities from the students, the teacher’s attitude should be encouraging instead of criticizing. The core of the learning process in communicative approach is not what to learn, but how to learn. Both the teacher and the students can be the good designers of activities leading to effective communication. As long as the communicative purpose can be achieved, the teacher may leave certain language details and grammatical mistakes aside, giving the ground fully to the students to continue with their presentation. Unimportant grammatical mistakes that do not affect meaning are not the priority of the class, the priority being the accomplishing of the tasks and the achieving of communicative purposes.

The Evaluation of the Communicative Approach The author makes a survey of about 100 students who have attended English classes with communicative approach as the center for two semesters and summarizes the good points of communicative approach as follows: It stimulates the students in English learning; the students are more active and passionate in language learning and task performing; it achieves the variety of language teaching methods, using Internet, cell phones, electronic products, and computers as teaching accessory means and using pictures, audio, and video English materials as multimedia assistance to language teaching so the effects of communication will be enhanced; it correlates classroom interaction with post class self-learning and preview and review, cultivating the self-learning abilities of students; it provides the students with plenty of opportunities to practice colloquial and listening abilities and various ways of imitating and designing conversations and other activities to communicate with each other. Towards the use of new communicative approach in teaching, 75% of the students express their satisfaction and interest in this approach; less than 5% students say they feel pressure and anxiety in this mode of learning. Eighty-eight percent of the students think it helpful and contributive to futural career and it is a practical way of language teaching.

Conclusions The communicative approach in teaching English as a second language to Chinese native students can only be meaning when being applied in real teaching sessions. English teachers in new times are required to qualify for a more demanding job—not only as coordinator, organizer, counselor, and prompter during class interaction process with students, but also a learned scholar with multimedia, electronics, and computer knowledge. Better designing means for interaction among teacher and students make this approach in teaching vivid and successful. Students feel less frustrated and have greater motive in learning English. But it does not mean that the communicative approach is the only way that is effective in language teaching. How to use this approach in a better way in reality is still a problem unsolved and waiting for further exploration.

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