A Study On Student-Student Interaction In College EFL Classroom

New curriculum reform with the core idea of "all for students' development" especially pays attention to cultivate students' initiative and thinks much of interaction among students. The teaching aims of college English also aim at cultivating students' language ability and creativity, improving students' comprehensive quality. This demands to implement classroom teaching based on students, and student-student interaction (SSI) is the embodiment of this kind of classroom teaching. SSI is a valuable human source which is very important to teaching activities in teaching system, but it has been undeveloped till now. SSI is paid little attention to both theoretically and practically and even is regarded as a negative force, which is restricted and eliminated. Based on those that other person has done, this thesis attempts to do further research theoretically and practically on college English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom with the purpose of providing reasonable and effective suggestions for present English classroom teaching.As a special human interaction, classroom interaction here is all the interactions or mutual influences between the teacher and his/her students or among the students inside the classroom including teacher-student interaction and student-student interaction. Classroom SSI can be defined as promptive or inhibitive interaction or mutual influence among students (including student individuals, student individual and community, student communities) in classroom activities. As for the research on SSI abroad and at home, only a few scholars (eg, John Deway, 1970s;Chen Xuyuan, 1998;Li Dexian, 1999;Li Chunjing, 2002;Huang Shulin, 2001;Dong Ming, 2004) publish some articles and there is no systematic research. This paper tries to explore SSI in college EFL classroom based on the classroom observation adopting Flaunders' interaction analysis system(FIAC) and an empirical study on SSI, and based on Widdowson's communicative approach theory, Vygotsky's social interaction theory, Maslow's humanism theory, as well as Piaget's constructivism theory.SSI in college EFL classroom has some characteristics which are the multi-member and multi-level in interactive subjects, the interaction and reflection in interactive process, the complementarity and reciprocation and the all-sidedness in interactive effect. It can activate students' intrinsic motivation, promote students' autonomous learning, and improve students' English communicative competence. Some approaches can be adopted SSI for college EFL classroom, such as students' compiling and performance activities, organizing classroom teaching, giving a lecture and so on. Eight weeks' teaching experiment to a certain extent proves that SSI in college EFL classroom is helpful to promote students actively take part in classroom activities, to improve their learning initiative and English learning interest. At the same time, SSI in college EFL classroom will help students make greater progress in some other aspects of English learning. The author finds out some problems of SSI in college EFL classroom and analyzes the factors influencing SSI. The problems are formalization of SSI, random of SSI, incoherence of SSI, the effect of informal group on SSI, the uncontroverted of the question discussed in SSI. Besides, several factors influencing SSI are discussed in detail, such as students' learning interest, students' sex, students' personality, students' over-expectation to classmates, as well as teacher's teaching idea, teacher's classroom leading style, teacher's expectation to students. Basing on the analysis above, the author puts forward that teacher should be "Pygmalion" in classroom, promote students to actively take part in teaching activities, change teacher role and renew teaching idea, foster students' cooperative consciousness and cooperative skills and provide abundant learning resource for students.Because the theoretical and practical research on SSI lies on aninitiative stage and due to the limit of the time of our experiment, the author only throws out a minnow to catch a whale. The perfect of SSI theory, the exploring of the relationship among all kinds of interactions, as well as the exploitation and utilization of covert interaction need to be further explored. But the author thinks this thesis has certain theoretical and practical significance for it provides a base for further probing into a kind of SSI teaching model in college EFL classroom, which suits for the situation of China.