Nowadays, the communicative language teaching thought , which views students as a centre, has been widely accepted. Discussion-oriented course designing has greatly improved students' listening and speaking abilities as well as the self-thinking and self-teaching capacities. In order to compare its teaching effects with those of traditional spoon-fed teaching, an experiment was carried out between an experimental group and a control group . Finally it reveals that discussion-oriented communicative language teaching is better at improving the oral competence of non-English majors than traditional spoon-fed teaching and it shows no difference in the teaching outcome between the two sexes.