The Application Of The Interactive Teaching Approach In College English Reading

From 1960s, there have been many teaching models about reading, such as the bottom-up model, top-down model, and interactive, or say, psycholinguistic model. This thesis introduces the interactive model and discusses the application of the interactive approach to college English reading teaching.As we know, reading is an active process of seeking meaning. The learners must be actively engaged in the process so that they can construct their own meaning.The interactive teaching model emphasizes teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction, and the interaction between students and the reading materials through the pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading stages. Under the interactive teaching model, the students can make good use of various reading strategies in activating their prior knowledge, constructing their own meaning about the reading information and consequently enlarging their schematic structure.In this thesis, a teaching experiment and a questionnaire are conducted to prove its effectiveness in improving the students'reading ability. It is shown that after four months of studying under different teaching models, the students in the experimental group have made greater progress in the test, and there have been significant differences between the two groups. The questionnaire which is conducted after the experiment shows that the students from the experimental group have done a better job in using the reading strategies through their own evaluation.Hence, it is concluded that the interactive model is actually an effective approach to the college English reading. However, due to various limitations, we need to do further research in this field.