In Zhang Xiangli’s thesis On Fosering Junior Middle School Students’ English Oral Communicative Competence through Scaffolding Instruction in 2008, and in Liu Shuying’s, In Scaffolding Young Learners in Language Learning (2013), the learning is viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which means a significant reappraisal of approaches to teaching English as a foreign language, and they aim to provide with a very rich set of suggestions for classroom implementation of communicative activities. In their works, the latest design of communicative activities will be quoted.

In Zhou Jie’s thesis Tasked-Based Language Teaching and the Cultivation of Junior School Students’ Oral English Ability in 2009, she has testified the hypothesis: Task-Based language teaching can improve junior school students’ communicative competence from the result of the application of this theory on students’ English learning.

Generally speaking, all these researches contribute a lot to the formation of my thesis whether abroad or at home. Although there are many studies of cultivation of communicative competence, there are few researches analyzing the cultivation of junior students’ communicative competence and proposing constructive methods by taking both the task-based language teaching method and scaffolding theory into consideration.

3. Necessity of Developing Students’ Communicative Competence

3.1 The current situation of junior students’ communicative competence

English has reached its height in recent years for two major reasons. The first reason is certainly the significance and necessity of English in communication and work because of the frequent international interaction. The rapid development of economy has attracted some world-famous companies to set up their branches in China, undoubtedly, the English is indispensable to those who want to get a job from the company. Under such background, the English teaching in middle school is attached with more importance. The second reason is that English occupies a high percentage in Chinese traditional college entrance examination. English has been being a key factor of success in the examination and seems to have been demanded increasingly. Due to the pressure of entrance examination, much effort is invested to English both by teachers and students, some students even attach more importance to English than to other subjects.

However, the situation of junior school students’ communicative competence is still not favorable. On the whole, the junior school education has made remarkable progress in cultivating students’ communicative competence. Constant innovation is procured in teaching methods and the students’ communicative ability is gradually improved. However, the dumb English has become commonplace in junior school in spite of several years’ English learning. Generally speaking, although the new curriculum reformation is growing vigorously, the traditional English teaching methods are still applied in junior school. Teachers choose to put much attention to language points and focus less on communicative abilities because that teachers’ work is judged by students’ achievements in certain standard examination. They arrange a large amount of exercises and tests about grammar and vocabulary, which leaves students less time to speak English in class let alone to communicate with teachers or students. What’s worse, students hold the belief that it’s useless to foster communicative skills because they may not have chances to go abroad or to communicate with foreigners. Gradually, the dumb English is formed. Consequently, for the strong desire of high marks, teachers and students just concentrate their energy on language points which are required in tests.来!自~优尔论-文|网www.youerw.com

3.2 Factors affecting junior students’ communicative competence

There are major two factors affecting junior students’ communicative competence. On one hand, the communicative competence doesn’t receive its due attention from teachers. Some teachers just show their interests to linguistic competence because they think it is the linguistic competence that guarantees the high scores in the exam, while they totally ignore the necessity of communicative competence, others wrongly suppose that once the linguistic competence is acquired, the communicative competence will follow in a natural way. Thus, in the classroom teaching, teachers don’t spare their efforts in selecting an effective method to improve students’ communicative competence.