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, few of them dare to speak English during the first few classes. They know every word or phrase they need to use and every grammar point they are to follow, however, the only problem is that they can’t express it orally. To encourage them to be brave enough and fluent enough in expressing ideas orally what they are already capable of writing in English is the greatest challenge for an English teacher in such a situation. They already have motivation and interest in learning and practicing oral English, and then it is the teacher’s responsibility to help them to take the first step in practicing oral English. Students’ active involvement in classroom activities is the basis of organizing a successful oral English class, and thus it requires the teacher to use a more student-oriented teaching approach. Therefore, it is suggested that a few classes shall be devoted to warming up and getting students actively involved in oral English classes, so as to set up the foundation for success in following classes. Communicative Language Teaching Approach can be preferably used to gain fluency in speaking English towards this end. B. Contents to be taught in oral English course A dilemma for an oral English teacher teaching students majoring in international trade is what to be taught in this course: common daily expressions or practical but more complicated business English. It is argued that English learners in China should emphasis on the vertical aspect rather than the horizontal aspect in learning and practicing oral English, that is to say, on the condition of limited time and energy, an English learner shall learn more expressions on complete and various topics concerning his present or future field of working, such as doing business with foreigners, rather than learning every possible expression on a same topic, such as saying hello to a foreigner. Since the students majoring in international trade are more likely to be involved in business in the future and they will only have oral English courses in the first year, it is suggested the content in the oral English course shall be based on real business situations incorporating everyday English expressions. The content shall be arranged according both to difficulty and to topics. Situational Language Teaching Approach can be used in explaining new points to students, while CLT activities can be adopted to practice fluency. III. Brief introduction of SLT and CLT To have a better idea of why and how SLT and CLT can be used in solving the above problems, we shall first have a thorough understanding of the these teaching approaches. Richards and Theodore (1988) give a best summary of teaching approaches in their book Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Since teaching oral English is the main concern of this paper, we will mainly focus on the aspect of teaching spoken English using these two approaches. A brief summary is as follows: A. Situational language teaching Acquiring linguistic data is not sufficient because the scene is not a linguistic one, we will meet different objects and events which are present at the moment of communication. In this respect Halliday remarks “when we acquire our primary language, we do so by learning how to behave in situations, not by learning rules about what to say” (M.A.K. Halliday et al. 1964:179) The situational language teaching approach just follows this rule. Situational language teaching was originally called oral approach, which was deve