A SURVEY ON THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
A SURVEY ON THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Nowadays, with the internationalization of this world, the foreign language learning and teaching has become especially important. In fact, since foreign language study was brought to school, various language-teaching methods have been used one after another, such as the Grammar –Translation Approach, the Direct Approach, the Audio-lingual Approach, etc. In 1970s, a new approach for language teaching, especially for foreign language teaching ---the Communicative Approach was put forward. It soon evoked widespread discussion and was said to be a “revolution” in the field of language teaching. So what is “the Communicative Approach”? What are its features? What are its pros and cons? This paper will give a brief survey on it. “The Communicative Approach”, according to the Longman Linguistic Dictionary, “ is a methodology to teach foreign language or language as a second language.” To put it into details, it is a methodology based on the communicative theory, aiming to achieve communicative competence. The form of communicative theory has a close relationship with the sociolinguistics, which focus on the relationship between language and society and study how to use language in different social communities. According to the sociolinguisticians, the function of language is communication, and the work of sociolinguistics is to study how language can be used in the social communication. The Communicative theory and soon the Communicative Approach develop based on this, which emphasizes that the job of language teaching is to teach people how to use language in the communication, that is to help people to develop the communicative competence. In 1972, the version “communicative competence” is first raised by a sociolinguistician named Dell Hymes. In 1971, his book On Communicative Competence was published, which set a theoretical ground for the Communicative Approach. Since then, this approach is
Nowadays, with the internationalization of this world, the foreign language learning and teaching has become especially important. In fact, since foreign language study was brought to school, various language-teaching methods have been used one after another, such as the Grammar –Translation Approach, the Direct Approach, the Audio-lingual Approach, etc. In 1970s, a new approach for language teaching, especially for foreign language teaching ---the Communicative Approach was put forward. It soon evoked widespread discussion and was said to be a “revolution” in the field of language teaching. So what is “the Communicative Approach”? What are its features? What are its pros and cons? This paper will give a brief survey on it. “The Communicative Approach”, according to the Longman Linguistic Dictionary, “ is a methodology to teach foreign language or language as a second language.” To put it into details, it is a methodology based on the communicative theory, aiming to achieve communicative competence. The form of communicative theory has a close relationship with the sociolinguistics, which focus on the relationship between language and society and study how to use language in different social communities. According to the sociolinguisticians, the function of language is communication, and the work of sociolinguistics is to study how language can be used in the social communication. The Communicative theory and soon the Communicative Approach develop based on this, which emphasizes that the job of language teaching is to teach people how to use language in the communication, that is to help people to develop the communicative competence. In 1972, the version “communicative competence” is first raised by a sociolinguistician named Dell Hymes. In 1971, his book On Communicative Competence was published, which set a theoretical ground for the Communicative Approach. Since then, this approach is