Interactive Teaching And Cultivation Of Students' Communicative Competence

The final goal of English teaching is to enable learners to use English for communication, that is, to cultivate students' communicative competence. However, the current state of English teaching is far from this goal. Students show their low communicative competence in many aspects of real communication. My investigation showed the main causes are: 1) that most teachers still use the traditional "one-way communication" method to pass knowledge to students; 2) that most English classes are still teacher-centered so that students have few opportunities to communicate actively with teachers or other students; 3) that students are short of enough learning resources inside and outside classroom.Constructivism holds that knowledge is constructed by the learner himself, not transmitted by others. It emphasizes students' active role in class and believes that students should learn actively instead of passively accepting knowledge. According to interaction theory, learning occurs through interacting with other people; interaction is the most important element for interactive classroom teaching. English class should be constructed by teachers and students cooperatively. The teaching model should be a flexible combination of teacher-students interaction, student-student interaction and students-computer interaction. English should be taught and learnt as a tool for communication and students should get more opportunities to practice their English. Based on Constructivism and interaction theory, interactive teaching propped up in1970s and obtained approval gradually. In interactive classroom teaching, a variety of activities can teach students how to communicate with others, overcome the drawbacks of traditional teaching methods, and cultivate students' good communicative competence.This thesis combines the relevant concepts, theoretical bases, principles of interactive teaching with the current state of students' low communicative competence to obtain three feasible and effective patterns of interactive teaching. Teacher's questioning is the most common pattern used in classroom, which can offer students the impetus and opportunity to practice English directly and actively; group work is popular with students, which can create equal and free atmosphere and help students form a concept of collaboration; CALL is a new pattern which can provide vivid image to initiate interaction in classroom and a great number of learning resources outside the classroom.