Interactive Teaching Strategy And The Fostering Of Middle School English Students' Communicative Competence

Language is a tool for communication. Fostering students' communicative competence isthe final goal of English teaching. Thanks to the initiative of cultivating students'communicative competence, the phenomenon of "deaf-dumb" English has been improved alot in the past years. However, influenced by test-education system, in middle school manyteachers are still used to teaching English as knowledge. In class, they pay too much attentionto explaining language points, and students are busy copying what the teacher says. Thestudents are in a passive position during the whole period of classroom teaching and theirenthusiasm is restricted. In addition, students have few chances to practice the language, sothe improvement of their communicative competence is badly hindered. According to social constructivist theory, knowledge is constructed by the learnerhimself, not be transmitted by others. It emphasizes students' active role in class and arguesthat students should learn actively instead of accepting knowledge passively. Socialinteraction theory argues that from the time of their birth children are in a social world, andtheir learning occurs through interaction with other people. The people around, especially thelearner's partners, are very important to his cognitive development. In classroom English teaching, teachers and students are both the principal parts.Classroom activities should be constructed by both teachers and students. The teaching modelshould be the flexible combination of "teacher-student interaction", and English is really usedas a tool for communication. In the course of English teaching, teachers should be good atputting the newest educational theories and advanced teaching methods into practice, and begood at stimulating students' initiative of learning English and help them to form effectivelearning strategy. Based on the writer's years of teaching practice and the current state of English teachingin middle school, this thesis analyzes the kinds of factors that influence students' developmentof communicative competence. It also synthesizes constructive theories, interaction theoriesand other related theories, and attempts to closely combine these theories with classroomEnglish teaching in order to explore new ways to enhance students' communicativecompetence.