Modern society has entered the information age, good oral communicative competence will help us communicate and exchange information better and make things easier to be done. Middle school English teaching emphasizes cultivation of the students’ English communicative competence. Now the new teaching material contains a lot of practice activities, but not teaching contents based on grammar. Thus it can be seen that it is very important to cultivate students’ oral communicative competence. But in fact, under the condition of the communicative approach doesn’t go far in teaching, the phenomenon of basing on the examination, attaching great importance to the knowledge in books and despising language practice still exists. Large parts of our countries’ English teaching activities are still stay in the traditional teaching mode. Teachers can easily use the teaching material, but lack of the ability of organizing language for communicative activities. English teaching emphasizes book knowledge, word phrase and examination, ignoring the students’ communicative competence, and students rarely speak English in class, so it is the dumb English.
Therefore, this study will apply the communicative approach to middle school oral English teaching and point out that the communicative approach has overcome the malpractice of the traditional teaching method which emphasizes on teaching language knowledge and ignores training spoken skills, and focus on cultivating students’ communicative competence, emphasizing the communication in the teaching process and the communicative approach can encourage and stimulate the students’ enthusiasm for learning and can achieve the goal of oral English teaching easier, cultivating the language talents in social needs. Thus, the communicative approach should be widely practiced in oral English classroom in middle school.

II. The Theoretical Framework of the Study: the Communicative Approach

The communicative approach has once replaced the traditional teaching method and is still in the ascendant. And this part focuses on the theoretical description of the communicative approach from the following aspects: the definition, the features, the theoretical basis and the comparison with the traditional teaching method.
2.1 The Definitions and Features of the Communicative Approach
2.1.1 The definitions
In order to improve foreign language teaching, the researchers explore new ways of foreign language actively. S. J. Savignon proposed language teaching communicative competence thinking in 1972, John Munby published “communicative syllabus design” in 1978, and Widdowson published “Teaching English as Communication” and these remark the formal establishment of the communicative approach in 1978. 交际教学法在中学英语口语教学中的应用(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_35013.html