Abstract：

In senior high school, the teacher-centered teaching approach has a long tradition and has become an important teaching style in classroom routine (Hu, 2002). That kind of teaching approach emphasizes structural knowledge and translation works (Hu, 2002). It has been severely criticized that students focus on rote-memorization (written and oral repetition) as the principal learning strategy, without paying enough attention to the practice of speaking competence (Ma and Peter, 2009). Besides, the opportunities of using the speaking language in real life are limited. Even the communicative tasks are of less use in a classroom, due to the tremendous pressure of the college entrance examination (Ma and Peter, 2009). We spent a large amount of time practicing our reading, listening, and writing skills in our language (English) learning classes. The development of speaking competence has been a neglected area for a long time. However, the need to update contemporary language pedagogy requires reforms in  teaching approaches, which calls for the emphasis on learners’ communicative competence (Peng, 2014). The teacher plays an essential role in improving learners’ language development in second language teaching (Walsh, 2006). So it is important to investigate how to facilitate learners’ speaking competence through the appropriate change of teacher’s roles in the teaching process.

Key Words：

second language teaching; teacher role transformation; Chinese context