The Application Of Interaction In Listening Teaching In Middle Schools

Listening is used for more than any other single language skill in normal daily life. It is an active and creative activity. Listening comprehension is the core of the listening process. Furthermore, Listening test is an essential part of the learning in junior middle schools. In the beginning, there was no listening test, but since 2004 there have been 25 points of listening in a total of 120 points in junior schools' examination. This change indicates that listening is a very important part in language teaching and learning. How to teach English listening efficiently is the major concern for junior school teachers. At the same time, the new curriculum standard for listening by the National Educational Commission in recent years has pushed middle school teachers to take innovative teaching methods.Interactive Language Teaching, which is a new teaching approach, was put forward by Brown Douglas and Rivers Wilga M. Brown (1994) and R/vers (1997) elaborated this concept in the way that teacher and students participate simultaneously in the process of language teaching and learning. In this way, it can improve students' communicative oompetence as well as interactive competence. The junior school where the author is working is a non-key school, the students' English level is uneven. Most of students come from the rural areas and their English proficiency cannot meet the goal of curriculum standard, and are especially poor in listening. Take the senior school entrance exam for example, the listening results were far from satisfying. Therefore, based on achievements done by other scholars, the author tries to pinpoint that Interactive Language Teaching can be applied in English listening class in middle schools hopefully seeking for a better and practical way which can help students improve their listening abilities.This thesis starts with the importance of listening comprehension in English teaching and learning, and shows the significance of this method applied in the listening teaching. The theoretical framework in this thesis is mainly derived from Krashen's Input Theory and Schema Theory. In order to prove the effectiveness of interactive language teaching in listening, the author has made an experiment by carrying out this teaching method in listening in the two classes in the same grade. The results show that interactive language teaching is a more effective approach which can enhance junior students' listening competence as well as interactive competence as compared with the traditional listening teaching methods.In conclusion, a summary is made of the thesis. The interactive approach is effective and meets the needs of English teaching and learning in a better way.