Excuses for Avoiding Communicative Approach in English Classes

Poor educational background

Most of the English teachers in rural areas are non-university graduates or graduates from non-formal teachers colleges or universities. Comparatively speaking,their listening and speaking ability are poor. They know little about English language teaching theory. It is no wonder that they cannot organize their English classes in English as they are required to. Since Communicative Approach places high demand on English teachers, it is beyond their ability to put the theory into practice.

Little knowledge about the Communicative Approach

The information in Table 3.5 shows another reason for the failure of practice of Communicative Approach in English classes. It is evident that most of the English teachers know little about Communicative Approach. If they know little about it, how can they practice it?

Misunderstanding of Communicative Approach

Through the interview, we could see that some English teachers, mainly those in city middle schools, do know something about Communicative Approach. However, they have a misunderstanding about it. In their opinion, if they organize group work, pair work, or create situation for presentation, that might be the Communicative Approach. They fail to know an important fact that group work or pair work can be either linguistic or communicative activities.

The information in Table 3.4 shows that some English teachers just give lipservice to the principles of Communicative Approach, but not truly ground their teaching practice and techniques in such principles.

Physical environment

Large class is one of the key reasons for not having been able to practice Communicative Approach in the English classes. Usually there are more than 60 students in one class. The space of a classroom is limited. There is no enough room for students to move about. What is more, the seats in some classrooms are fixed. It is very difficult for both teachers and students to move within the limited space. Even if teachers organizes some communicative activities, he cannot get sufficient feedback because there are so many students in one class and the class time is limited.

Poor equipment is also regarded as one of the reasons for the failure of practice of Communicative Approach.

Time limitation is another reason for the failure of practice of the Communicative Approach. Only 45 minutes is not enough for teachers to fulfill their teaching task and at the same time spend some time doing communicative activities in class.

Educational environment

Exam-oriented language teaching forces all the teachers and learners to focus on preparation for entrance examination because it is the decisive factor for their future occupation. Some lead teachers in Hebei Province said: “If there is no reform on entrance examination, how can we talk about the reform on English language teaching?”

Fulfillment of the tasks is the teachers’ main aim in the classroom language teaching. Since a text covers so many aspects of English knowledge, the teacher needs time to explain them and students need time to digest them. If they organize some communicative activities, then may fail to complete their teaching task, which will be criticized by their immediate authorities.

The compilers’ ignorance of the practical teaching situation in middle schools

The compliers of the textbook did suggest that Communicative Approach should be used. They did aim at training the learners’ communicative competence through using the textbook. But they neglected an important fact that most of the English teachers in middle schools are poor at listening and speaking. It is beyond their ability to manage their classes in English. Some English teachers’ have a good masteryof English knowledge and their language skills are better, but other factors, such as what are mentioned above, have prevented them from carrying it out in their classes. What makes the matter worse is that they know little about the language teaching theory and they had few chances to attend such kind of training classes. Even if they had any chance to attend the workshops or seminars on language teaching, there will be a long way to go for them to put the theory into practice because of their poor language proficiency.

Lack of cooperation between practitioners and researchers

The most important factor that resulted in the failure between theory and practice is the obvious disjunction between academic research and the practical teaching. The main question was that there was one group of people who did the research and there was another group who did the teaching. That was total reversal. Researchers seldom attended the English classes and they knew little about the real teaching situation in middle schools. They did their research just by sitting in their office and by reading some theoretical books. They just told the teachers what to do, but they failed to tell them how to do and how to adjust their teaching according to their own teaching situation. No wonder there exists a sharp mismatch between theory and practice, between academic research and practical teaching.

How to solve this problem? How to improve the middle school English teachers’theoretical and linguistic knowledge in order to meet the new challenge brought about by the new situation? How to combine the theory with the practice? The following are some suggestions on how to solve this problem.