Changing College Students' Reticence In English Class By Applying An Interpersonal Interactive Approach

East Asian (especially Chinese) students of English as a second/foreign language have been alleged to be reticent learners in the recent ESL/EFL literature. They are reluctant to participate in classroom activities; they are unwilling to give responses; they even do not ask questions. Many teachers and researchers contribute such reticence to learners'inherent disposition that is formed in socio-cultural attributes of Asian societies, which simply cannot be altered. The one-way lecture-mode teaching methods, like the Grammar-Translation Method, hence, are consequently adopted in teaching practice. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of such methods have been more and more apparent with the increase of international communication and competition and the new requirements for talents'overall English proficiency. Thereby, a reconsideration of Chinese learners'reticence in English class is a prerequisite for the change of the traditional ways of teaching.The first thing to do for a research on Chinese learners'passivity is to have a full understanding of the various causes behind reticence. There are some previous studies, but the limitations of these findings are: A) the researches on such a theme are mainly conducted in Hong Kong district, while there are some differences in English learning environment between Mainland and Hong Kong areas; B) though lots of causes have been found and analyzed, and some corresponding countermeasures have been raised in these studies, these strategies lack systematization and their feasibility and effectiveness fail to be tested in real practice. It has been revealed through the study of special causes behind Mainland learners'reluctance that the seeming reticence in English class is more likely to be the performance of their habitual classroom behavior that has been formed in the instructional contexts for a long time than to be the consequence of any inherent disposition of learners themselves. On the basis of an empirical study, it is also found that Mainland learners hold a positive attitude to overt participation in classroom activities. Therefore, with more emphasis on the interactive theory from the field of pedagogy, a new teaching approach has been put forward--the Task-based Interpersonal Interactive Approach. Its main objective is to alter classroom reticence by changing learners'learning habits with the task-based interpersonal interactive instructions.The approach has been applied to the practice to test its effectiveness. The whole...