My Short View on Communicative anguage Teaching

【Abstract】 In CLT, great emphasis is put on the teaching of language use. It aims at developing students’ communicative competence. That is to say, it is that to enable the students to use the foreign language in work or life when necessary is regarded as the final goal of foreign language teaching.

【Key words】 Communicative Language Teaching(CLT), language use, language usage and communicative competence

Cambridge learner’s English and kinds of language training schools have challenged language teaching in public schools owning to communication-center of the former and the latter’s examination-center. It is obvious that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), in recent years, has become fashionable in that it leads to a variety of development in syllabus design and in foreign language pedagogy. In CLT, great emphasis is put on the teaching of language use.

For many years, the structural syllabus dominates some language programs including most of the foreign language course in China. It is a kind of grammar-oriented syllabus about a selection of language items and structures and learners trained by structural syllabus of ten prove to be communicatively incompetent.Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. CLT makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication. It is learner-centered and emphasizes communication and real-life situations. The goal of CLT is to develop students’ communicative competence, which includes both the knowledge about the language and the knowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations. In short, the principal aim of CLT is to have students become communicatively competent.

language use in real life differs from what is done in classroom language teaching, in order to bridge the gulf between them, it is possible to adopt CLT which aims at fostering students’ communicative competence. Usage is one aspect of performance, which makes evident the extent to which the language user demonstrates his knowledge of linguistic rules. Use is another aspect of performance, which makes evident the extent to which the language user demonstrates his ability to use his knowledge of linguistic rules for effective communication.

In communication, one should first learn to ‘speak’ the language, not to ‘read’ the language. Learners are generally required to use their knowledge of the language system in order to achieve some kind of communicative purpose. CLT advocates task-based language teaching.