The Effect Of Interactive Teaching Approach On Learners' Oral English Competence

As we all know, the ultimate goal of language learning is able to communicate with it in real communication situation. As a global language, English is playing an increasingly important role in international communication nowadays. Qualified English talents are badly needed in all walks of life in China. The fact is, however, the English competence, especially the oral English competence of today's college students is not as good as expected. The reasons for this phenomenon are diverse, e.g. the teaching syllabus, the testing and evaluation forms, the teaching methods and so on, among which the teaching method remains an important one. For traditional language teaching, most of the class time is spent on the teacher' explaining, thus in the teacher-centered classroom, it's lacking in both teacher-student communication and student-student communication and the students lack the chances to practice what they have learned so they become passive receivers.The situation is more serious in the local colleges than it is in the key institutes. In local colleges, English majors' present condition of oral competence is depressing. They have difficulty in understanding what they have heard and they cannot speak out what they want to say. Thus, a great number of students are reluctant to speak English in the classroom and their motivation for English learning is gradually decreased. The main duty of the local colleges is to cultivate qualified English teachers for the local primary and middle schools. The teachers' oral English competence will heavily influence the students' English study. Therefore, it is necessary to find a more effective way to replace the dominant traditional teaching method in local colleges.With this intention, based on the interactivist theory for teaching, the author conducts a research in Heze College, Shandong Province to investigate that compared with the traditional teaching method whether the English majors' oral ability can be improved through the interactive teaching approach with empirical analysis. The author randomly chooses two intact classes in the Foreign Language Department. There are 70 first-year English majors with similar oral ability. One class with 35 students is randomly chosen as the control class and the other with 35 students is the experimental class with 35 students, too. For the intensive reading course, the only difference of the two classes is that the control class is exposed to the traditional teaching method, while the experimental class is exposed to the interactive teaching approach. For other courses, the treatments for the two classes are the same. A pre-test-post-test experimental design is adapted to test the effectiveness of interactive teaching approach on improving students' oral ability after half a year of study. The group interview is added to find more useful information.With the help of the programme of One-Way ANOVA, the author analyses the data from the experiment and concludes that the interactive teaching approach can more effectively improve the English majors' oral ability than the traditional method. The information from the group interview helps to prove this point.The findings of this study show that the interactive teaching approach can improve the English majors' oral ability more effectively than the traditional way. Therefore, the author suggests that the interactive teaching approach be applied to the English majors' teaching in local colleges.