Introduction The traditional approach to English learning and teaching is increasingly being challenged by the communicative method. Not everyone accepts or agrees with this new trend, while others feel that it is not radical enough. ELT is a field full of controversy, and there is no universally accepted conventional wisdom. My personal experience of foreign language teaching has been with both junior and senior middle school students. In recent years I have been trying to implement the communicative method with the texts in the current senior books. In this paper I shall discuss the traditional approach, my own way of teaching and an experiment with both the traditional and communicative approach.