Interactive Language Teaching And The Fostering Of The Students' Communicative Competence In Senior High School EFL Classroom

Fostering the students'communicative competence is regarded as one of the most important goals in teaching a foreign language. According to the views of social constructivism and social interactionism, language learning is constructed through receiving new language, understanding it and converting it into their own knowledge by learners themselves. It is also learned through interacting with the surroundings by learners. The traditional teaching models are not effective to improve learners'communicative competence. The main problems in the models are that they separate the teaching of language from communicative meaning, so that they neglect the characteristics of creativity and communication of language. As a result, the students only can do the problems on the exam papers, but they can not open their mouths to speak English, The lack of English communicative competence does harm to the students'development in the future. Based on the problems described above, this paper argues that the formation and fostering of communicative language competence must be through "interaction"in the teaching and learning of the target language. Interactive language teaching is adopted in this paper to overcome the shortcomings in traditional teaching models, because it emphasizes on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, therefore it contributes to the fostering of learners'communicative competence. "Interactive"language teaching pattern is a completely new teaching pattern and it centers on students. This paper explores the concept of interaction, its theoretical basis, the interactive principles, the interactive activities and roles of the interactive teacher and student, etc. This paper explores and practises the interactive language teaching approaches, which shows that it is helpful for improving the students'communicative competence and achieves the better results. Therefore, to foster learners'communicative competence by developing oral proficiency through interactive language teaching model is the main concern of the paper.