A Study On The College Oral English Teaching Model

In recent years with the view of keeping up with the new developments of highereducation, China has needed to meet the needs of the country and society byproviding more qualified personnel in the new era. The higher education system hasexperienced a change from a teacher-centered instruction into a more student-centeredone. Classroom interaction, especially teacher-student negotiated interaction has beenthe research focus for many scholars. However, a review of the research literatureshows that there is a lack of research on teacher-student negotiated interaction inEnglish as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in regard to students’ oral Englishproficiency. From a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, this study investigates thenature of teacher-student negotiated interaction in the oral English classroom. At thesame time, this study also attempts to discuss how the teacher provides scaffoldingduring the interaction in order to facilitate students’ oral English proficiency and thefunctions of scaffolding.This study focuses on classroom research and the participants in this study are60non-English major college students at a university in Northeastern China. Theseparticipants constitute the experimental group and the control group. Two EnglishLanguage Teaching (ELT) instructors are selected through sampling to participate inthe study; one practices a negotiated interaction teaching method in the experimentalgroup and the other practices a communicative language teaching (CLT) method inthe control group.On the basis of one-semester microgenetic analysis of the classroom discoursecomplemented with questionnaire, interview, pre-test and post-test, this study hasfound that negotiated interaction generates the most effective impact on students’ oralEnglish proficiency and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Moreover, it hasalso found that the effective use of scaffolding functions to a greater extent promotesstudents’oral English proficiency. More importantly, the findings have highlighted theimportance of helping (scaffolding) students to notice their knowledge gap and promoting the self-regulated learning of the target language.This study is theoretically and practically important. Theoretically, it concernsthe ways in which social interaction can help to develop ZPD, with particularreference to the learning of oral English in classroom settings and shows thatscaffolding in teacher-student negotiated interaction is the most effective pathwaywhere students’ oral English proficiency can be pushed forward. Pedagogically, thestudy addresses the importance of teacher training on scaffolding strategies. In a word,learning effectiveness in a classroom setting relies on the nature of social interactionbetween the teacher and the students. This is good in the sense that the teacher and thestudents know how to manage the interaction so as to develop students’ ZPD on oralEnglish proficiency.