A discussion of Communicative Approach and its application in teaching spoken English in middle schools交际法及其在中学口语教学中的应用 1. Introduction“We live in the world of languages which are used for us to communicate, we need get more and more information from some other countries and communicate with them.” 1 Furthermore, with Chinas entering the WTO and successfully bidding for the Olympic games 2008, and “with the development of business transactions around the world, being capable of speaking fluently has emerged recently as one of the basic requirements of modern people in the global village.”2 However, for a long time, “the nature of the language as a means of communication was ignored in teaching and learning methodology. The emphasis was only put on linguistic and forms without consideration for the nature of language.” 3 Nowadays, in middle school, the process of oral English teaching usually consists of the following steps: first, the teacher gives the setting; next, the teacher presents the common sentence structures; then, the students practise passively. During the whole process, the students only make conversations following the teaching materials mechanically and absorb new knowledge passively, and it is really hard for the teacher to be clear about if the students have really mastered the new knowledge and if they can communicate with each other fluently. Therefore, new teaching approaches need considering. “The communicative language teaching is an innovation in English language teaching. It reveals the social function of language and the essence and goal of foreign language teaching, and it always regards the development of communicative ability as the core of foreign language teaching.” 4 As a new teaching approach, the Communicative Teaching Approach was introduced in China since 1990s. Now, it has become one of the main teaching approaches in the field of foreign language teaching in our country. This paper will make a discussion of Communicative Approach and its application in teaching spoken English in middle schools. 2. An overview of Communicative ApproachCommunicative Approach is a popular teaching approach in todays China. Many linguists are exploring it in order to improve the learners English. This chapter serves as an introduction of Communicative Teaching Approach and tries to make sure that this approach will help the English learners in Chinese middle schools. 2.1. Social and theoretical background of the Communicative Approach The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are to be found in the language teaching in Britain dating back to the late 1960s. “It is not a tightly structural method of teaching; it is a broad assembly of ideas, from a range of sources others”, 5 which is accepted as effective and good practice by contemporary teachers.”In the past years, the communicative approach has been adapted to many levels, the teachers in primary schools, middle schools, universities are aware of the need to update teaching approach for the existing problems during the process of teaching. They felt that students were not learning enough realistic, whole language. In Brown. H. Douglas opinion, the ultimate of English learning does not lie in the mastery of the rules of language, but in accomplishing the communicative functions by means of vocabulary and grammar. 6 In 1970s, interest in the communicativestyle teaching mushroomed in Britain; the students in middle school tended to use authentic language to communicate with one another in real situation.The ideas of Communicative Language Teaching are not only accepted by British language teaching specialists, curriculum development centers, but also applied in the work of the Council of Europe, in the writings of Wilkins, Widdowson Candlin, Christopher Brumfit, Keith Johnson, etc.Around the 1960s, specialists of linguistics, education, psychology, sociology, observed languages and language learning from different perspectives. All these above provided a solid theoretical foundation for the emergence of Communicative Approach. And during this period, Dell Hymess view became very influential.The concept competence originally comes from Chomsky. Furthermore, Hymes proposes Communicative Competence. This is of four components:“Possibility-the ability to produce sentences Feasibility-the ability to produce sentences which can be decoded by the human brain.Appropriateness-the ability to use correct forms of language in a specific socio-cultural context;Performance-the fact that utterance is completed” 7 From Hymes theory of Communicative competence, we know that if a speaker want to speak successfully in a speech community, he should care for the four components above, which means he should be capable of speaking in the right place with the right utterance and has the ability to produce complete sentences.To sum up, the CA has mainly the following tw