An Investigation Into The Current Situation Of The Student-student Interaction In The Senior High School English Classroom

Senior high school English teaching has achieved a great success in grammar aspect in China for a long time. However, students'communicative skills and self-teaching abilities have been ignored. The new round of the curriculum reform attaches great importance to the development of students'communicative skills in terms of teaching aims, developing patterns, emotions and attitude and so on. It is the interactive teaching that has made great contributions to creating a good language environment and providing more opportunities to use the language, which is therefore being advocated vigorously in China. In recent years quite a few scholars and researchers of China (Wu Kangning, 2000; Kang Xiaomei, 2001; Zuo Bin, 2002; Cheng Xiaoqiao, 2003; Zhang Yina, 2006) have fixed more attention on classroom interaction and conducted much research on theories, implementation and influential factors of classroom interaction etc., but the implementation of classroom interaction, especially the student-student interaction, still have met with some resistance because traditional teaching patterns and beliefs about English learning have played a dominant role for long.Through classroom observation and interviews with the teachers and the students the thesis made an investigation into the current situation of the student-student interaction in senior high school classes, aiming at understanding how classroom interaction is carried out at present, including its frequency, interactive time, types, interactive activities, participation of students, classroom atmosphere and influential factors. According to the statistical data of the results, it is evident that some progress in the employment of the student-student interaction has been made so far, but there still exist many problems in the process of the implementation of the student-student interaction, for example, types of interaction and interactive activities are simple. The student-student interaction is not employed very often and the interactive time is limited. Some students do not participate actively in the student-student interaction. Classroom atmosphere is not very active. Most interactive activities lack learning values. The student-student interaction can promote students'comprehensive abilities, but their learning results are not improved greatly. Then the influential factors are analyzed from the perspectives of source of interaction, the teacher, the students, evaluative system and other aspects. Finally, some solutions to the problems are put forward: sharing interactive teaching resources with the teachers of the same school; three principles of designing interactive activities─variety of interaction, related to teaching content, within students'reach; emphasizing learning values through interactive activities; promoting teachers'relevant qualities; changing teachers'and students'traditional beliefs; establishing a good rapport between the teacher and the students; testing listening and speaking abilities in the college entrance examination.The thesis is intended to make foreign language teaching circles pay more attention to the implementation of the student-student interaction in senior high school English classes and make some contributions to the educational reform, English teaching and research, hoping to reduce the gaps between theories and practice and help to perfect English teaching in China. In addition, it is also expected to promote the overall development of the senior high school students'quality and to enhance foreign language teaching in senior high school English classes.