A Case Study On Differences Of Interactive Decisions Made By Chinese Non-English Majors' English Teachers In University

This paper studies three different college English teachers in Wuhan University of Technology (WHUT) who are coming from the same department. Under the same teaching requirements, these three teachers are using the same teaching material to instruct students of similar proficiencies in class. In this surrounding, they present basically the same but somehow specifically different teaching practices in class, which are the practical reflection of teachers'interactive decision in class.Through the real class observations, interviews of both teachers and students, questionnaires for both teachers and students as well, this paper tries to find out the different interactive decisions made by three teachers under the same teaching requirements, analyzes the different feedbacks of their students towards some specific interactive decisions which are realized in the form of particular practices. In addition, this paper analyzes one teaching practice, which however, reveals different teaching principles of three teachers to reflect their own interactive decisions. By making a comparison of the differences and students'agreement with their interactive decisions, the paper tries to find out the way for the young or inexperienced college English teachers to understand their distances from the experienced and excellent teachers, which may result in directly some improvement of their teaching career. Besides, the paper also implies its significance to the improvement of not only the young and inexperienced teachers, but also those teachers who may find hard to get improvement in their teaching, and suggests they should make a reflective thinking about their teaching harboring students'feedbacks in their minds.This paper starts with an introduction of how and why the topic was proposed in this essay. An interesting phenomenon that different teachers usually result in different students'achievements arouses the researcher's interest in this issue.Concerning about the studies of the interactive decision, linguistics have defined and distinguished it from the other two decisions, i.e., the planning decision and the evaluation decision, pointed out that interactive decisions are usually made in the class, while the other two are usually made before or after the class. In addition, the paper discussed the influential factors which related to interactive decision and made clear the reasons of interactive decision.Generated from the questionnaires, interviews and class observations, students'agreement with their teacher have been analyzed; teachers'specific practices are identified from the others, and general conclusions can be made as the following: teachers differ in their individual teaching even though they are in one university. They differ in their individual teaching focuses, which results in the diversity of their interactive decisions. The more experienced a teacher is, the more agreements of students he will get. Consequently, the young and inexperienced teachers need to shorten his weaknesses of teaching with the excellent teachers to improve ones teaching achievement.It is also implied in this paper that the limitation and restrictions of the study, and encourages further research to study on students'agreement with some possible general teaching practices to quantify young teachers'distance from those excellent experienced ones.