| English teaching in China has to prepare the students to pass various kinds of exams and develop their communicative competence in English as well. It's obvious that the traditional teaching method based on behaviorism can't accomplish both of the two aims while the interactive teaching approach, which is based on constructivism, humanism and social interactionism and has aroused the interest of many linguists is good enough to do this challenging task. By introducing Krashen's input hypothesis and analyzing Gass's model of SLA the author contends that interaction, meaning negotiation in particular has an important role in the provision of comprehensible input. Swain's Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Izumi's illustration on the role of output in the context of Gass's SLA process are presented to show the significance of output to the whole process of SLA. Therefore learners need to participate in interaction, meaning negotiation in particular to produce more output. An experiment was carried out to explore the viability of interactive approach in the Chinese EFL classroom. The results show that 1) Chinese students do engage in meaning negotiations but they act differently in different types of classes. They participate in more meaning negotiations in group work than in whole-class settings and they act more actively in the interactive whole-class settings than in the traditional whole-class settings; 2) the interactive approach can be as effective as the traditional one in helping them to master their learning materials; 3) the interactive way of teaching is superior to the traditional one in the improvement of students overall English proficiency.
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