| In China, with the increasing demand for communicative competence in English and the acceptance of communicative language teaching methodology, organizing small group activities has become increasingly popular in English classes. But many problems that come from big class small group activities, like teachers' lack of control of their class, noises and many others, have in fact made it next to impossible to organize small group activities. In view of this, the author proposes a cross-group, interactive-compensatory small group teaching framework. The purpose of this paper is to examine how students interact in the target language in this teaching framework, their participation and their attitudes.The study was conducted in the autumn semester in 2004 in Hebei Scientific and Technical Teachers' College. Participants include 49 freshmen majoring in agriculture. Data collection methods include audio recordings, classroom observations and a post class informal interview. Data analysis focuses on students' language production and negotiation of meaning. Research results indicate that in this teaching framework, all members of the class received some opportunities to use the target language to participate in the interactional activities and instances of negotiation of meaning believed to be beneficial to second language acquisition also occurred. Students also felt "pushed" to make their language comprehensible. Besides, students used many new words of the unit to convey their messages and they not only got much better understanding of the text but began to learn to advance their own ideas. This could help to explain students' positive and favorable response to this teaching frameworkduring the post-class interview. All this indicates that the proposed teaching framework is an interactive learning environment within which learners can communicate with each other in the target language and this will ultimately benefit their communicative ability.
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