A Study Of The Interactive Approach To The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Language is an instrument for human communication, and the ultimate goal of language teaching is to cultivate students' ability to communicate information and express ideas. Communication derives essentially from interaction. Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings or ideas between two or more people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other. After several decades of research on teaching and learning languages, we have found that language teaching is not a one-way flow of information, but an interactive process. Brown (1994) and Rivers (1997) states Interactive Language Teaching in which the teacher and students participate in simultaneously in the process of language teaching and learning and therefore, improve students' communicative competence as well as interactive competence. Nowadays as a new teaching approach, Interactive Language Teaching is receiving more and more attention and gradually adopted in the foreign language teaching. Some successful cases in students' training by autonomous teaching mode and interactive teaching mode in foreign countries provide our foreign language teaching with useful enlightenment.The core of the Interactive Approach is using languages to learn and learning to use languages rather than learning about languages. In classroom interaction, almost everything that is done is done with a communicative intent without the exception of gaining real linguistic knowledge. Since more and more importance being attached to communicative competence, both teachers and learners have become aware of how essential listening is as a language skill for communication. Listening comprehension is an active and creative activity and an interaction between listener and speaker. It is not merely the process of a unidirectional receiving of audible symbols. After the initial reception of sound, we human beings perform at least other major operations on that set of sound waves. From this point of view, the current model of listening is therefore an interactive one in which linguistic information, contextual clues, and priorknowledge interact to enable comprehension. In the light of the Interactive Language Teaching theory, many interactive teaching measures to improve listening ability should be paid more attention including the choice of authentic listening materials, the introduction of background information, the use of prior knowledge to predict the context, listening strategies training, group discussion to the while-listening tasks etc. Teachers should apply many effective methods to facilitate students' learning attitude and motivation and the students should be provided with as many opportunities as possible in class to apply the grammatical rules they have learned to the communicative contexts through various interactive activities such as role-plays, discussions, skits or joint problem-solving task, etc.This thesis, based on the theory of the Interactive Language Teaching, tries to overcome the shortcomings of traditional teaching methods and analyze what effective listening entails. It aims to suggest a more effective approach, that is, interactive approach, to listening course to enhance students' listening competence as well as interactive competence. This thesis is composed of the following chapters:Chapter one mainly focuses on the relevant literature on the teaching of listening comprehension. It discusses the importance of listening comprehension in English teaching and learning, essential features of listening comprehension and factors which affect listening. Then it moves to the characteristics of real-life listening, listening strategies in developing listening skills and classroom listening activities.Chapter two introduces some theories of interaction, the definition of interaction, its features and the principles of Interactive Language Teaching. Then it discusses the importance of interaction in language-learning situations, interactive teaching and learning activities. This chapter mainly focuses on measures of Interactive listening teaching approach i...