An Experimental Study Of Interactive Teaching Model In English Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

The interactive teaching model refers to an open, dynamic, and developing teachingprocess, which enables the students to gain a good command of knowledge and acquireabilities by the teachers’ elicitation and guidance through various interactive activities. Underthe interactive teaching model, the interaction involves not only between teachers andstudents but among students, as well as among teachers, students, teaching materials andenvironment. Thus, it helps to strengthen the students’ positive emotional attitudes andlearning autonomy, and consequently it helps to make teaching and learning promote mutually,and improve the overall teaching effect. Since1970’s, researchers in China have begun theirstudies on the interactive teaching model. Though there have been fruitful research findings inthis field, the study of the application of the interactive teaching model with students insecondary vocational schools as subjects still remains inadequate. Meanwhile, according tothe “Secondary Vocational School English teaching Syllabus”, the aim of English teaching insecondary vocational schools is to cultivate the students’ language skills including listening,speaking, reading and writing, promote their comprehensive ability of using language andhelp them acquire the basic ability of using professional English. It advocates that Englishteaching should be student-centered; teachers should try their best to create a harmoniousrelationship between teachers and students, stimulate students’ interests in learning andpromote their communicative competence. However, investigations show there are a lot ofEnglish teachers continue to adopt the traditional teaching model. They pay too muchattention to imparting English knowledge and neglect the classroom interaction, causing largenumbers of students to lose interest and confidence in learning English. As a result, the studyof applying the interactive model in English teaching in secondary vocational schools issignificant and important.This study aims at discussing whether the interactive teaching model, compared with thetraditional model, can more effectively stimulate students’ interest and increase their Englishlevel in secondary vocational schools. The author carried out an experimental study, in whichquestionnaires, language tests and interviews were used as instruments. Two parallel classestaught by the author were chosen from the Yantai Advanced Normal School to participate in the study for a school year. One is the experimental class with38students and the other is thecontrolled class with36students. The experiment of the interactive teaching model wasconducted in the experimental class, while the controlled class kept on receivingteacher-centered traditional teaching model. In order to check if there is a significantdifference between the achievements of the two classes before and after the experiment,students of the two classes took two English tests respectively. Besides, a questionnaire wasdesigned to reveal the English learning situation of the two classes before and after theexperiment, and after the experiment an interview was conducted to some students in theexperimental class to get more information of students’ learning. In addition, the data obtainedbefore and after the experiment were analyzed by SPSS19.0.The main findings are as follows: Firstly, compared with the traditional teaching model,the interactive teaching model could better stimulate students’ interest, arouse theirenthusiasm, enhance their confidence and improve their cooperative ability in Englishlearning. Secondly, after one year of experiment, the average score of the English exam of theexperimental class increased by10.98, from62.5to73.03, P=0.000(<0.05) in the pairedsample T-test, which means there was a significant difference between the achievements ofthe experimental class before and after the experiment; and it was9.2higher than thecontrolled class, with P=0.000(<0.05) in the independent sample T-test, which means therewas a significant difference between the achievements of the two classes. Therefore, we mightsay that the interactive teaching model is more effective than the traditional teaching model inimproving students’ English achievements.This study may imply that, to a certain extent, the interactive teaching model, botheffective and feasible, is of great help for English teaching and learning in secondaryvocational schools.