A Study Of Interactive Intensive Reading Instruction To Improve College Students' Reading Competence

To improve students' reading competence is one of the important targets of college English teaching. Based on the schema theory, this paper attempts to explore the view of the interactive reading instruction to cope with the weakness of the traditional intensive reading teaching. Different from the traditional practice of the teacher-centered approach in the intensive reading classroom, this study aims to find out whether the college students' competence in reading can be enhanced under the framework of interactive instruction by means of group work, teacher-student and student-student interaction in classroom, so as to verify the significance of the interactive reading teaching.This paper starts with a brief introduction of the importance of reading in college English learning and the existing problems in traditional intensive reading classroom. Then on the basis of the interactive approach to language pedagogy, interactive reading model, and especially the schema theory of reading, an experiment was conducted in two classes (one as the experimental class and the other one as the control class.) to investigate the effect of the interactive activities on the students' reading ability and reading behaviors, which would offer valuable insights and thus facilitate college English teaching. The subjects were freshmen in a college. In the process of the experiment, the students had two reading tests and finished a questionnaire. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were employed to analyze the data. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 11.5) was applied in the processing of the data. Paired-samples t test was run to help determine whether the differences between the two sample means were statistically significant. Frequency analysis and Chi-Square test were used to discover whether there were significant differences in the students' self-reported reading behaviors or habits between the two classes. The study ended with a conclusion that the interactive reading instruction was conducive to improve the students' reading proficiency. Interactive activities were effective to the students' reading competence. The study proved the effectiveness of the interactive approach in the intensive reading classroom; however, teachers are demanded to design the teaching plan carefully and transform some teaching concepts.