第三、四章重写部分原稿.doc

Chapter III Methodology of the Research 3.1 Hypotheses Nowadays, many English teachers in China still use traditional approaches in language teaching. The result is that many university students cannot use English appropriately although they have learned it for many years. They are structurally competent but communicatively incompetent, and many of them even cannot perform a simple communicative task. The main purpose of this study is to check whether college students’ communicative competence can be improved by organizing communicative activities in language teaching. Two hypotheses are presented as follows: 1. Communicative approaches are more effective in developing students’ communicative competence in comparison with traditional approaches. 2. Students’ communicative competence can be enhanced greatly by organizing communicative activities in English teaching. 3.2 Subjects 3.2.1 Subjects in the Questionnaire Survey In the questionnaire survey (see Appendix I), the students are selected from Qingdao Agricultural University majoring in secretary, horticulture and food quality and testing. All the students are freshmen in the second semester. The average age of them is 19, and 40% of them are male while the rest 60% are female. 3.2.2 Subjects in the Experimental Study The subjects of the experiment come from Qingdao Agricultural University. In order to avoid the differences caused by different teaching styles and teaching results, the author select two classes (N=84) majoring in horticulture, whom are instructed by the same teacher. The students are freshmen in the second semester. The number of students in each class is 42. The two classes are divided according to their scores for National College Entrance Examination so that their English level is roughly equal. Class 1 is an experimental class in which the teacher uses communicative approaches and organizes many effective communicative activities in class, and class 2 is a control class in which the teache