A Tentative Study On An Interactive Approach To Improve The College EFL Learners' Competence In Reading

In this study, an attempt is made to explore the issue of teaching reading to college EFL students from a socio-cognitive perspective. Different from the conventional practice of teacher-centered approach in reading class, this study attempts to investigate the college EFL learners' competence in reading under the framework of interactive approach by means of group work, teacher-student conversation, etc. in classroom, so as to see if and how the interactive approach can enhance the students' reading competence.This paper starts with a brief introduction to reading theories and problems existing in reading classrooms and poses the research questions. Then based on the interactive approach, the interactive model, especially the schema theory of reading is adopted to explore the effect of teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction in students' reading competence. A pilot experiment is conducted, which offers invaluable insights and facilitates the successful implementation of the main experiment. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are employed to analyze the data. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 11.5) is applied in the processing of data and t-test is run to help determine whether the difference between the two sample means is statistically significant. The study ends with the conclusion that interactive approach is beneficial to learners' reading competence; group work, teacher-student communication are both effective to the students' competence and enjoyable in reading classroom; the practice is worth the effort from the teacher and students, but may need careful design, a longer time and patience to make its advantage more evident.