论文摘要：

It has been 40 years since the birth of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which has had a profound methodological impact on English language teaching worldwide. It has also become the most debated approach. Research on CLT flourished with the rise of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as a new methodological development in the communicative tradition in the 1990s, with the latter giving more consideration to the realization of the approach at the classroom level. However, despite the large amount of research, debates over CLT and TBLT have never led to any consensus due to the contradictions between the desirable teaching methodology and the unsatisfactory contextual factors that constrain its use. The debates also indicate the limitations of the research methodologies used in previous research, with more attention given to the faithful implementation of CLT and TBLT, while less attention given to teachers’ agency and autonomy in making their own methodological decisions.

The present study seeks to investigate a sample of Chinese EFL teachers’ pedagogic lived experience with regard to the Communicative Approach to Language Teaching (called C-TBLT in this thesis). By teachers’ lived experience is meant the totality of their everyday pedagogic lives as a holistic and organic system. The ethnographic approach is used in this study in data collection in order to avoid the risk of a positivistic and reductionisitic understanding of teachers’ teaching only through the narrow lens of C-TBLT. The participants of the study are ten English teachers from a senior high school, one of the top quality schools in Beijing. One-year weekly visits to the school and extensive interactions with the ten teachers contribute to a thick description of teachers’ beliefs, practices and daily concerns in their natural teaching context. An on-going phenomenological hermeneutic interpretation was conducted to arrive at a deep understanding of the meaning of the teachers’ lived experience in relation to C-TBLT.

With the teachers’ teaching pedagogy examined in the entirety of their lifeworlds, C-TBLT does not seem to play a big role in their daily pedagogic thinking. In terms of the teachers’ teaching practices gleaned through classroom observations, there seem to be two different pedagogic discourses among teachers. One is the official, public discourse and the other is the unofficial, private discourse. The former which is reflected in teachers’ demo class pedagogy is consistent with a very strong view of C-TBLT, strongly oriented toward the meaning of the language. In the teachers’ routine classes, there are both meaning-oriented teaching and form-oriented teaching. However the balance is clearly slanted towards a stress on language forms. The discrepancy between the two pedagogies can be seen as the result of the time constraint and the exam constraint that exist at the case study school. Teachers’ teaching is found to be more responsive to the immediate demands of their teaching contexts than to their personal belief systems. Thus changes in the classroom require structural and institutional changes to the whole ecological educational system in which teachers have to live and survive. However, the demo class pedagogy, which represents the promoted pedagogy in the curriculum reform effort in China, can be perceived as the projection of the future routine pedagogy if the external pressure imposed by the Gao Kao is to be removed or reduced.