Vocabulary Acquisition In College English Course Through An Interactive Teaching Approach

The primary difference between the traditional and modern educational ideology and pedagogy is the focus on teaching or learning, teacher-centered or learner-centered, from which develop two conflicting teaching and learning theories.Traditional teacher-centered teaching pattern can no longer satisfy graduates'need for English level in modern society as well as their demand for the improvement of English performance and communicative competence. Therefore, teaching pattern is changing into learning pattern as a result of a new pedagogic concept which is learner-centered. Interaction is the collaborative exchange of thoughts, feelings or ideas between two or more people resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other, which is a very important point in the study of Second Language Acquisition. Western researchers have conducted a great deal of studies on the teaching method of classroom interaction and have gained great success. Now it is a very popular method in the foreign language teaching and learning in western countries. The researchers in our country have just began to attach importance to it recently. However, the theories of the method in China have not been fully reviewed. In the practice of our college English teaching, lack of interaction is a common thing.Based on interactive teaching approaches, Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis in the theories of Second Language Acquisition, my paper studies the relationship between interaction and vocabulary acquisition. The research is conducted from the aspects of language input and output framework and Vygotskian's socio-cultural framework in interactionist theories. The results of students who acquire vocabulary in college English intensive reading course under interactive English teaching and under traditional language teaching are investigated and compared by means of experiment and questionnaire. Effectiveness of two teaching methods and factors that affect vocabulary acquisition are discussed and analyzed. It is shown that under interactive English teaching students can best take in comprehensible input, produce more comprehensible output and achieve communicative goals by using vocabulary they acquire. Traditional English teaching in our country only attaches importance to language input but neglects language output, thus learner cannot acquire vocabulary effectively which results in their poor performance of expression in target language. Owing to the advantages of interactive teaching approach, it is proposed that as far as vocabulary teaching and learning is concerned, the combination of language input, output, negotiation of meaning and teacher feedback in classroom interaction can facilitate college English teaching in China and improve learners'English performance and communicative competence.