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exploring it in order to improve the learners’ English. This chapter serves as an introduction of Communicative Teaching Approach and tries to make sure that this approach will help the English learners in Chinese middle schools. 2.1. Social and theoretical background of the Communicative Approach The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are to be found in the language teaching in Britain dating back to the late 1960s. “It is not a tightly structural method of teaching; it is a broad assembly of ideas, from a range of sources others”, [5] which is accepted as effective and good practice by contemporary teachers.” In the past years, the communicative approach has been adapted to many levels, the teachers in primary schools, middle schools, universities are aware of the need to update teaching approach for the existing problems during the process of teaching. They felt that students were not learning enough realistic, whole language. In Brown. H. Douglas’ opinion, the ultimate of English learning does not lie in the mastery of the rules of language, but in accomplishing the communicative functions by means of vocabulary and grammar. [6] In 1970s, interest in the communicative—style teaching mushroomed in Britain; the students in middle school tended to use authentic language to communicate with one another in real situation. The ideas of Communicative Language Teaching are not only accepted by British language teaching specialists, curriculum development centers, but also applied in the work of the Council of Europe, in the writings of Wilkins, Widdowson Candlin, Christopher Brumfit, Keith Johnson, etc. Around the 1960s, specialists of linguistics, education, psychology, sociology, observed languages and language learning from different perspectives. All these above provided a solid theoretical foundation for the emergence of Communicative Approach. And during this period, Dell Hymes’s view became very influential. The concept ‘competence’ originally comes from Chomsky. Furthermore, Hymes proposes Communicative Competence. This is of four components: “Possibility-the ability to produce sentences Feasibility-the ability to produce sentences which can be decoded by the human brain. Appropriateness--the ability to use correct forms of language in a specific socio-cultural context; Performance--the fact that utterance is completed” [7] From Hymes’ theory of Communicative competence, we know that if a speaker want to speak successfully in a speech community, he should care for the four components above, which means he should be capable of speaking in the right place with the right utterance and has the ability to produce complete sentences. To sum up, the CA has mainly the following two theoretical bases: 1) Communicative language theory: (1) Language is a system for the expression of meaning. (2) The primary function of language is for interaction and communication. (3) The situation of language reflects its functional and communicative uses. (4) The primary units of language are not merely its grammatical and structural features, but categories of functional and communicative meaning as exemplified in discourse. 2) Learning theory (1) the communicative principle: Activities that involve real communication promote learning. (2) the task principle: Activities in which languages are used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning. (3) the meaningful principle: language that is meaningf