Improving Students' Reading Ability With Interactive Teaching: An Empirical Study

This paper is to find out whether the students'reading ability can be improved on different levels through interactive teaching style instead of conventional teaching style with empirical analysis. There are 118 subjects from two classes with similar reading ability, and the students are divided into two classes, one is control class with 59 subjects, the other is experimental class with 59 subjects too. The two classes are taught by the same teacher using the same teaching steps to train the students'reading ability in one term, by introducing word attack skills in reading process. The only difference is that the teacher used Interactive teaching method in the experimental class, and pay attention to different kinds of interaction, including teacher and student, student and student, student and reading materials during the teaching process. There are four questionnaires in two groups before and after the experiment. The first group is about the influence to the subjects'reading ability after using the word attack skills. The second group is about the influence to the students'attitude, interest and self–confidence by Interactive teaching style.From the results of the first group questionnaires, we can see that most subjects from both classes made great progress in word attack skills. However, there is also a great difference between subjects'answers in the experimental class and the control class. The numbers of students choosing Answer A is in the experimental class obviously increased more dramatically than that in the control class. Since the only difference between the two classes is one employed an interactive teaching style and the other a conventional one, we can infer that interactive teaching style seems to be more effective in improving students'word attack abilities. From the results of the second group questionnaires, we can see that after a term of interactive teaching in reading class, the students'interest, attitude and confidence are all greatly improved. In the control class the students'interest, attitude and confidence don't change a lot. From the results we know that interactive teaching style can improve the students'reading ability greatly. This reminds our senior English teacher of employing this interactive teaching style in order to improve the students'reading ability effectively.