The Research On English Classroom Interaction In Senior High Schools

English teaching and learning has witnessed a great reform since the last several decades and nowadays it moves into a new stage. Some new teaching methods such as the Communicative Approach and TBLT attach importance to the cultivation of students’ communicative competence. They are widely adopted in English teaching. The essence of the new pedagogy is interaction and participation. With the further implementing of the New Curriculum Reform, students’ communicative competence has been more emphasized in English teaching in China. Teacher-student interaction and students’ peer work play a great role in the development of students’ integrated language competence. Classroom interaction emphasizes the mutual effects between teachers and students and students’ peer work in language learning. It mainly aims to cultivate students’ integrated language ability and to arouse students’ learning interest and motivation through creativity and negotiation. Because of its efficiency on cultivating of students’ English ability, classroom interaction has been widely used nowadays. However, in the reality of its practical application, some problems still exist. So, further research and teaching practice on this topic are needed.Under such circumstances and based on Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Teaching; Input Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis; Social Setting Theory, the author makes a survey about the English classroom interaction in Guangming New District Senior High School in Shenzhen. It tries to investigate the major problems that exist in current English classroom interaction and find out the factors that affect classroom interaction. All these are assumed to help the study of classroom interaction in English teaching. The following research questions are discussed in this thesis:1.What is the present situation of English classroom interaction?2. What are the factors that affect English classroom interaction?3.What are the effective strategies for English classroom interaction? In order to find out the answers to these questions and to testify the effectiveness of English classroom interaction, the research methods of classroom observation, questionnaire and interviews are adopted. The results show that classroom interaction is effective in improving students’ integrated language competence. However, there are still some problems in the actual application of English classroom interaction, for instance, the lack of effective teacher-student interaction, teachers’ lack of flexible questioning strategies, insufficient emotional interaction, inappropriate group division, ineffective teachers’feedback and so on. At the same time, active and effective interaction will stimulate students’ learning motivation and develop their communicative competence. It can also help the construction of their language knowledge and reinforce their self-confidence and the sense of cooperation and creativity. The factors that affect classroom interaction are analyzed and some interactive strategies are given on how to improve English classroom interaction.