The Application Of Interactive Approach To Intensive Reading Classroom Teaching For Non-English Majors

English, as a tool for communication with the outside world, has achieved moreand more attention in China. But the current situation of English teaching is far from thesatisfactory. With the coming of the information era, the traditional ways used incolleges and universities English teaching has not met the needs of the socialdevelopment. In all kinds of language teaching, the intensive reading refers to acomprehensive course, which plays a significant part in college English instruction. Theeffective teaching approaches employed in intensive reading classroom teaching havealways been the goal pursued by language teachers. To improve students’ reading abilitybelongs to one of the vital targets of college English instruction. But in the traditionalintensive reading classrooms, the explanation of the vocabulary and phrases andanalysis of the sentence and text structures have been paid more attention rather thanreading skills. In other words, traditional intensive reading teaching puts students’mastery of English linguistic knowledge instead of the reading comprehensionproficiency at the main position of class. In addition, teachers spend most of time toexplain the linguistic knowledge in traditional intensive reading classrooms where thereexist little or even no teacher-student interaction and student-student interaction.Students passively learn knowledge given by the teachers and they have feweropportunities to speak and practice English which result in students’ lowercommunicative competence. More and more students are weary of such traditionalteaching methods, and lose their interest in learning English. So it is about time thatEnglish teachers found a suitable teaching approach to change the “time-consuming andinefficient” teaching status. The Interactive Approach seen as a relatively new teaching system has reaped the wide acceptance in western countries. And the researchers andscholars have increasingly attached the importance to this new teaching approach inChina. But in our country, most of English teachers have carried out the experiments ofthe interactive teaching mainly in the elementary and secondary schools. In the domainof college English teaching, the researches about the Interactive Approach are restrictedto theory, and few empirical studies have been operated by scholars and researchers.The above statement, therefore, inspires the author to carry out a research on the effectsof applying the Interactive Approach to the intensive reading teaching.Sixty students participate in this study. Class One is the experimental group inwhich the teacher applies the Interactive Approach in the intensive reading teaching,while Class Two is the control group who receives the traditional intensive readinginstruction. In this study, some instruments such as questionnaire, pre-and-post test aretaken into use to examine:1) whether the application of the Interactive Approach tointensive reading classroom teaching can cultivate students’ interest and activate theirintrinsic motivation in English;2) whether the interactive teaching applied in theintensive reading classroom can help students improve their reading ability andcommunicative competence. SPSS software is used to analyze the data of this study.According to the analysis of statistical data, the outcomes about the effects of applyingthe Interactive Approach to the intensive reading classroom teaching have beenexplored:1) the interactive teaching in the intensive reading classroom is helpful tocultivate students’ interests and activate their intrinsic motivation in learning English;2)non-English majors’ reading and communicative competence are improved throughapplying this relatively new teaching approach to intensive reading classroom teaching.