Application Of Interactive Theory To The Teaching Of College English Listening

With the globalization of the world, English has become an important means of communication. China needs more and more talents who have advanced professional skills and high English proficiency level. It is clear that listening is the first means of acquiring information, so English listening teaching has become more and more important.In traditional teaching, the teacher stands in the front of class "teaching" and the students sit in rows "listening". In modern society, this "cramming" teaching method begins to be discarded. Interaction is an important form in the classroom teaching. Classroom interaction is the harmonious resonance between teaching and learning involving language, thoughts, feelings and acts. Listening is an interactive process. Students become the active learner during the pleasant atmosphere and they hope the guides and helps from the teacher.In this thesis, the author applys the interactive theory to the listening teaching of college English to answer such questions:"Can the interactive theory be applied to college English listening class? Does the interactive teaching method improve the students'listening comprehension and communicative competence?". The research with some useful information is helpful for further study.The author reviews different views about definition of interaction. On the basis of cognitive interactive theory, the author does many researches on Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Swain's Output Hypothesis and Long's Interaction Hypothesis. Interaction hypothesis, put forward by Micheal Long(1983), emphasizes learning by means of expediting active communication and conversational adjustments. It also pays much attention to the importance of comprehensible input, the participation of the students and comprehension output.The thesis studies listening teaching which includes factors affecting listening and an interactive model of listening comprehension. Listening comprehension refers to the activities of human brain processing the information heard consciously and actively. It is not merely the process of a unidirectional receiving of audible symbols. It is an active process of construction. According to the principles for designing listening teaching, the author designs a sample lesson to show interactive method used effectively in college English listening teaching.The experiment and analysis are used in the thesis to investigate whether the interactive model of college English listening has influence on the improvement of listening ability and communicative competence of the students. Fifty-one college students, who are freshmen of non-English major from Changchun Normal University, are chosen as the subjects in this thesis. There are significant differences between these two groups after seven months of studying. The thesis includes questionnaires, pre-test, post-test and the interview. Both students and teachers prefer the interactive model of listening. Through the analysis of SPSS software results, we can see that the achievement of the experimental class is greater than that of the controlled class. We can draw the conclusion that the interactive English teaching method is an effective approach to enhance the students'listening and communicative competence.The thesis proposes some major findings and implications of the interactive English listening teaching. As a whole, there is a student-centered class in the interactive teaching. The students enjoy the feeling that is free to take opportunities for listening and speaking. The students are participating actively in the language they listen and then also they can produce comprehensible output. They can master the main content of the lesson and receive more confidence in the period of interaction. As English listening teachers, we must make consideration of the students'differences, use different kinds of visual aids in the class, encourage the students to be active in the activities and improve their abilities in the positive and harmonious classroom.Although the author have made many efforts for this thesis, there are still some limitations about the research. The author only takes 51 students from two classes of Changchun Normal University in seven months of teaching. Because of the author's lacking of SPSS knowledge, the analysis of the questionnaires and the comparison of two tests may affect the experiment more or less. In further study, interactive teaching should be conducted in other majors and grades of the students in more universities and colleges.In a word, the application of interactive theory to the teaching of college English listening has been proved successfully in the thesis. The students can benefit a lot from the interactive model in every aspect. The author wants to give some advices to the other teachers and students and hopes that the study can inspire them in how to improve their listening abilities.