The Interactive Approach And Communicative Competence Cultivation For Non-English Majors

The final goal of English teaching is to enable learners to communicate in English, that is, to cultivate students' communicative competence. However, the current state of English teaching is far from this goal. Students show their low communicative competence in many aspects of real communication. My investigation showed the following reasons : 1) that most teachers still use the traditional method to pass knowledge to students; 2) that most English classes are still teacher-centered and students have few opportunities to communicate actively with teachers or other students; 3) that students are lack of enough learning resources inside and outside classroom.This study is intended in an attempt to assess classroom interaction in college English teaching to cultivate students' communicative competence, for which three empirical studies are followed:1. One classroom observation was conducted to show the differences between the interactive approach and the traditional method by analyzing the data in different aspects: teacher talk, student talk, teacher feedback and so on along with an independent sample test and a two-sided test to prove the interactive approach has great effect on the experimental class.2. Questionnaire I was designed to find out whether the interactive approach was welcomed and what we should do in an interactive classroom by collecting questionnaires from 76 students of 2 classes of Grade One taught by interactive approach.3. Questionnaire II was given to 193 freshmen of second semester from five classes taught by the interactive approach to testify whether the interactive approach has great influence on students' communicative competence.This thesis combines the relevant concepts, theoretical bases and the experimental results with the current state of students' low communicative competence to obtain three feasible and effective patterns of interactive teaching. In teacher-student interaction, teacher's questioning is the most common pattern used in classroom, which can offer students the impetus and opportunity to practise English directly and actively; in student-student interaction group work is popular with students, which can create equal and free atmosphere and help students form a concept of collaboration; in student-computer interaction CALL is a new pattern which can provide vivid image to initiate interaction in classroom and a great number of learning resources outside the classroom.