In this paper we present a new approach to calculate optical spectra, which for the first time uses a polarization dependent functional within current density functional theory (CDFT), which was proposed by Vignale and Kohn [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 2037 (1996)]. This polarization dependent functional includes exchange-correlation (xc) contributions in the effective macroscopic electric field. This functional is used to calculate the optical absorption spectrum of several common semiconductors. We achieved in all cases good agreement with experiment.