Interactive Language Teaching And The Improvement Of Communicative Language Ability In ESL

Cultivating students' communicative language ability is regarded as one of the most important goals in teaching a foreign language. The teaching practice has proved that the three traditional teaching models which have had a strong influence on classroom practice and which teachers and learners still refer to are not effective to improve learners' communicative language ability. The models are Grammar Translation, Audiolingualism, and PPP(Presentation, Practice, and Production). The main problems in the models are that they separate the teaching of language form communicative meaning, so that they neglect the characteristics of creativity and communication of language. They still can't avoid the opinion of emphasizing on language form and ignoring the using of language.Based on the problems described above, this paper argues that the formation and the enhancement of communicative language ability must be through "interaction" in the using of the target language. Interactive language teaching model is adopted in this paper to overcome the shortcomings in traditional teaching models, because it emphasizes on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, therefore it contributes to the improvement of learners' communicative language ability."Interactive" language teaching pattern is a completely new teaching pattern and it centers on students. This paper explores the concept of interaction, its theoretical basis, the interactive principles, the interactive activities and roles of the interactive teacher and student, etc.Therefore, to improve learners' communicative language ability by developing oral proficiency through interactive language teaching model is the main concern of the paper.