The Effect Of Interaction Approach On The English Oral Competence Of HVC Students Based On Interaction Hypothesis

Higher vocational education is an important part of higher education in China. Its scale accounts for half of the total scale of higher education. It offers students the opportunity to receive higher education as well as specialized professional training which equips them with practical knowledge and competence. Therefore, these students have won the favor of a more and more internationalized job market of China. However, the teaching effect of English in higher vocational colleges is not satisfactory which leads to students’poor performance on English, especially English oral competence. This has long constrained students of higher vocational colleges to pursue a better job and a promising future. In addition, studies have showed that according to employers, the most-needed English competence of graduates in higher vocational colleges is English oral competence. English enables these young professionals to communicate with the world effectively and efficiently.Based on this circumstance and combined with requirements on English teaching reform in higher vocational colleges, the author carried out a research on the effect of interaction approach of English Teaching on the English Oral Competence of students in higher vocational colleges based on Interaction Hypothesis. The Interaction Hypothesis is currently the most comprehensive theoretical hypothesis in the field of second language acquisition. It depicts the whole learning process from the moment that learners start to learn their second language. It includes the language input learners obtain, their participation in interaction, getting feedbacks, and producing language output. Influenced by Constructivism, the interaction hypothesis put an emphasis on the development of cognitive mechanism in the process of second language acquisition. Combined with the research results of sociology, psychology, linguistics and other disciplines, the interaction hypothesis serves as an interactional language acquisition model which is also regarded as interaction approach.The author did the research in two parallel classes in Shandong Foreign Trade Vocational College for one semester (16 weeks). One of the classes was chosen randomly as the experimental class while the other was the control class with each class had 42 students. In the pre-test of the English oral competence, the results of the two classes did not show significant differences. After the author conducted interaction approach of English teaching in the experimental class and traditional approach of English teaching for the whole semester, a post-test of English oral competence was given for the two classes. SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze the results of the post-test. In addition, the author had an interview with students in the experimental class and teachers involved in the pre-test and post-test for qualitative research.The results of the research testified that interaction approach of English teaching can improve the English oral competence of students in higher vocational colleges significantly. In addition, the fluency, accuracy, lexical resources, pronunciation and intonation of their oral competence have all been improved significantly. Fluency has witnessed the most significant improvement among the four dimensions followed by accuracy, lexical resources and pronunciation& Intonation. Based on the Interaction Hypothesis, the interaction approach can offer abundant opportunities for students to speak English and improve their oral competence. In the process of interaction, they intake input, adjust prior language knowledge, learn from feedbacks and construct new output. It is in this process that students polish their prior language knowledge, enrich their vocabulary, and adjust their pronunciation in order to communicate with others fluently and express their ideas clearly. According to the research, interaction approach is highly recommended to English teacher in higher vocational colleges in order to equip students with a strong English oral competence so that they are more eligible to the job market and better prepared for challenges in the future.