An Empirical Study On Improving Students' Oral Communicative Competence In An Interactive Way Of English Teaching In Vocational Colleges

The ultimate goal of learning a language is to use it to communicate with others, which should be the purpose of language teaching. However, English teaching in China seems to be deviating from this purpose. Although educational reforms in recent years have produced great achievements, an embarrassing phenomenon is still in existence: Chinese students'oral communicative competence is still comparatively weak. After a couple of years'English learning, they still have difficulties in communication. The situation is even worse in vocational colleges.Due to complex reasons, traditional teacher-centered mode of teaching can still be found in vocational colleges. In this case, students become passive recipients. What they need to do is to listen to their teachers or just pretend to be attentive listeners. As time passes by, not only students but also teachers have become apathetic. Then, a vicious circle that is harmful to both English teaching and English learning gradually take shape.On the other hand, the current society is becoming increasingly demanding for the students. In this period of globalization, English is a basic skill for modern people. With China's entering the WTO, talents with excellent English proficiency are urgently needed. In order to better equip the students, English teaching needs changing. The teacher-centered mode of teaching must be replaced by the student-centered mode, an interactive way of teaching is the best choice.There have been fruitful theories and research findings concerning interaction and communicative competence. Theories of constructivism, social interaction, humanism, input hypothesis, interaction hypothesis and output hypothesis have provided abundant theoretical basis for interaction, while theories from Hymes, Canale, Swain, Bachman and Savignon have provided complete theoretical basis for communicative competence.Based on the above theories and the assumption that an interactive way of teaching can improve the students'oral communicative competence, this thesis makes an in-depth survey of the English teaching and learning in Chongqing Electric Power College, finds out the factors which affect English teaching and learning and puts forward feasible solutions.During the process of the research, the author carried out a small-scale experiment. The experiment lasted for one semester, including the students from four classes majoring in logistics and four classes majoring in power system automation technology. Two classes were picked out respectively from each major as the experimental group, while the rest four classes were treated as the control group. The experimental group was taught in an interactive way while the control group was taught with the traditional mode.After one semester's experiment, it was found in the post-experiment questionnaires that the students in the experimental group had stronger motivations, initiatives and interest in learning English than those in the control group. The post-experiment test also revealed the fact that the students in the experimental group had better oral communicative competence than those in the control group.The conclusion can be drawn that the interactive way of teaching has a huge advantage over the traditional teaching mode, in improving the students' oral communicative competence in particular.