Chinese students' perceptions of communicative and non-communicative activities in EFL classroom

Abstract This article reports the views of 30 Chinese university students on the appropriateness and effectiveness of communicative and non-communicative activities in their English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) courses in China. Using multimethod, qualitative research procedures, the researcher discovered that the perceptions of these students sometimes surprised their teachers, and that the students' perceived difficulties caused by Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) had their source in the differences between the underlying educational theories of China and those of Western countries. The results suggest that, to update English teaching methods, EFL countries like China need to modernize, not westernize, English teaching; that is, to combine the “new” with the “old” to align the communicative approach with traditional teaching structures. It is apparent from the study that only by reconciling communicative activities with non-communicative activities in English classrooms can students in non-English speaking countries benefit from CLT.

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