English Words Acquisition Through An Interactive Teaching Approach

The latest High School English curriculum requirements stresses that an important indicator of the successful reform of the teaching model is the development of individualized study methods and the learning ability on the part of students. Traditional teacher-centered teaching pattern can no longer satisfy graduates'need for English level in modern society as well as their demand for the improvement of English performance and communicative competence. Therefore, teaching pattern is changing into learning pattern as a result of a new pedagogic concept which is learner-centered. Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings or ideas between two or more people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other, which is a very important point in the study of Second Language Acquisition. Western researchers have conducted a great deal of studies on the teaching method of classroom interaction and have gained great success. Now it is a very popular method in the foreign language teaching and learning in western countries. The researchers in our country have just begun to attach importance to it recently. However, the theories of the method in China have not been fully reviewed.Based on interactive teaching approaches, Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis in the theories of Second Language Acquisition, my paper studies the relationship between interaction and vocabulary acquisition. The research is conducted from the aspects of language input and output framework and Vygotskian's socio-cultural framework in interactionist theories. The results of students who acquire vocabulary in college English intensive reading course under interactive English teaching and under traditional language teaching are investigated and compared by means of experiment and questionnaire. Effectiveness of two teaching methods and factors that affect vocabulary acquisition are discussed and analyzed. It is shown that under interactive English teaching students can best take in comprehensible input, produce more comprehensible output and achieve communicative goals by using vocabulary they acquire. Owing to the advantages of interactive teaching approach, it is proposed that as far as vocabulary teaching is concerned, the combination of language input, output, negotiation of meaning and teacher feedback in classroom interaction can facilitate English teaching in China.