The Application Of Interactive Approach In Vocational School English Teaching

As more and more importance is attached to English teaching in the society in recent years,English language is making itself into vocational schools as a compulsory course. Englishlanguage teaching usually starts with knowledge and is intended for competence, whichrequires a lot of skill practice. The thesis begins with an introduction of present conditions ofEnglish teaching in vocational schools, which is followed with the research subject: how toenhance the students’ interest and motivation, develop their communicative competence andoverall language ability by adopting interactive activities; and how to construct interactiveEnglish classroom teaching effectively in vocational schools. It is expected to help to build abetter perspective for future vocational school English teaching.Coming next in the thesis is the discussion of the theories and definitions of classroominteraction. The data, collected through the questionnaire, interview and tests, are analyzedquantitatively and qualitatively with the purpose of studying how the interactive activitiesinfluence teaching and learning in vocational school English classroom.The results from the questionnaire show that most of the current vocational school Englishclass is still teacher-centered with few chances for students to participate in interactionalactivities. It is focused on impartation of language and the students are the passive recipients ofinformation. In this situation, students lack the interest in English learning and theircommunicative competence can not be improved.In order to study the application of interactive approach in vocational school Englishteaching, an experiment is carried out at Qingdao Electronics School for four months. Twoclasses are chosen. One is the experimental class taught with interactive approach and the otheris the controlled class taught with traditional methods. During the teaching process of listening,speaking, reading and writing, some important activities are introduced: questions and answers,role-play, games and discussion. It has also explored the techniques of designing activitiesthrough concrete examples.By comparing the results from the pre-test and the post-test, and by analyzing the results ofthe interview after the experiment, a conclusion is reached: interactive teaching is suitable for the processes of English teaching and learning at vocational schools, and it is in perfect accordwith logical regularities of language learning; it can be performed well to improve students’communicative competence; it greatly stimulates students’ interest in learning English.On the basis of the research and the theoretical analysis, some strategies are proposed onthe effective implementation of classroom interaction. Teachers should change their roles frominstructors, controllers and actors to facilitators, organizers and directors, build close rapportwith students, encourage students to open their mouths, and properly deal with the linguistic aswell as non-linguistic errors made by the students.Teachers’ self-development is the fountain of persistent classroom interaction, and theirjob is more demanding and challenging. Hopefully, this thesis can make some contributions tothe vocational English teaching reform and the cultivation of students’ language competence.