The Application Of Interactive Approach To Listening Comprehension Teaching In Vocational College

Listening teaching plays an important part in the whole English teaching.Among the four language skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening isranked as the first. Improvement in listening is beneficial to the cultivation ofstudents’interest in English learning. And it will make them study more independently.In traditional teaching, the teacher stands in the front of the class“teaching”and thestudents sit in rows“listening”. In modern society, this“cramming”teaching methodbegins to be discarded. Interaction is an important form in classroom teaching.Classroom teaching is the harmonious resonance between teaching and learninginvolving language, thoughts, feelings and acts. Listening is an interactive process.Students become the active learner during the pleasant atmosphere and they hope theguides and helps from the teacher. Vocational college students are comparatively poorin English learning ability and skills, so it is vital know how to teach them English.Brown, who based his theory on that of input and output of second languageacquisition as well as the recognition theory, puts the interactive approach forward.His theory emphasizes the interaction between teachers and students and thedevelopment between the two. Students do not absorb knowledge passively, butconstruct actively. At the same time, the theory suggests that listening is not aone-way operation, but a two-way action between the speaker and the listener. Alsothe context plays very important role in the communication. From the theory weshould build up a more real context for the learners.Taking the present listening comprehension teaching situation and thecharacteristics of interactive approach into consideration, the author tries to applyinteractive approach into listening comprehension teaching, and to find out whetherinteractive approach is effective or not in improving students’listening competence.Therefore, the thesis is mainly concerned with an experimental research examiningthe effectiveness of interactive approach in listening teaching. Started from February2011, 76 sophomores from two classes of English Department, Rizhao Polytechnicwere chosen as subjects for an eighteen-week research. Class 1 with 39 students was sampled as the experimental group, which was exposed to interactive approach; Class2 with 37 students as the control group received traditional teacher-centeredinstruction. The two classes were chosen because they were proved to have nosignificant difference in their academic achievements, learning motivation, learninginterest and learning habit.To collect effective data and ensure the validity, this research employs thefollowing instruments: two tests (a pre-test and a post-test), two questionnaires (apre-questionnaire and a post-questionnaire) and interviews. The data collected areprocessed with the help of SPSS17.0. Results and analysis of the data indicate that theapplication of interactive approach in vocational college is an effective approach toenhance the students’listening and communicative competence. as a whole, there is astudent-centered class in the interactive teaching. The students enjoy the feeling thatis free to take opportunities for listening and speaking. The students are participatingactively in the language they listen and then also they can produce comprehensibleoutput. They can master the main content of the lesson and receive more confidencein the period of interaction. As English listening teachers, it is useful to makeconsideration of the students’differences, use different kinds of visual aids in theclass, encourage the students to be active in the activities and improve their abilitiesin the positive and harmonious classroom. Besides the vast benefits, this thesis alsodiscovers some problems which may probably occur and negatively influence theimplementation of interactive approach, and some practical strategies are proposed totackle them. In conclusion, interactive approach is highly effective and productive inlistening comprehension teaching. In order to make interactive approach widelyapplicable in listening comprehension teaching, some further research needs to beconducted.