What Influenced Teachers Adoption of the Communicative Approach in China?

上海龙凤1314 shlfby Xiao Qing Liao

上海龙凤1314 shlfIn the history of EFL teaching, China saw its first movement toward communicative language teaching (CLT) in secondary schools in the early 1990s. In 1992 the State Education Development Commission (SEDC) introduced a functional syllabus that set the goal of communicative teaching and listed the communicative functions to be taught. In the same year, in cooperation with the publisher Longman, the SEDC published a new textbook series for communicative teaching. The syllabus and the textbooks required teachers to teach communicatively in classrooms.

The movement toward CLT was not accidental. It came from an educational problem that needed to be solved: the widespread use of the traditional grammar-oriented method. Because teachers focused on grammar and structure, the traditional method produced unsatisfactory teaching results. Students became almost "structurally competent but communicatively incompetent" (Johnson & Morrow, 1981, p. 1). Faced with this backward situation, the SEDC felt an urgent need to change.

上海龙凤1314 shlfThe SEDC is the official authority for setting educational policy. It is the representative of the highly centralized Chinese system of education. Because the SEDC has so much power, it may seem that every teacher would have switched to CLT. However, because CLT was new in every way, it met with considerable resistance from the start. Many teachers tried to change the dominant teaching procedures but quickly got frustrated, lost their initial enthusiasm, and returned to tradition. As a result, CLT did not gain popularity in the early 1990s.

The key word underlying the use of CLT was feasibility: Was the use of CLT feasible? Opponents of CLT held that CLT was neither possible nor feasible in China because of specific conditions there. Proponents argued that CLT was indeed feasible if the

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