| As the global economy is rapidly developing, English has become the main foreign language in China as it is a way of linking up with foreigners. However, in most high schools, English teachers still use the traditional teaching method, which is dissatisfactory for language teachers to instruct so that it cannot satisfy Chinese learners’ need to study English. They instruct their students only with texts to teach grammar, words and syntax. Teachers hardly interact with their students. Consequently, most students have good marks in the aspects of grammar, vocabulary and writing skills, but they have low communication and listening abilities. It is much worse because the traditional teaching method neglects to develop students’ problem-solving abilities and critical thinking skills. This kind of method is not helpful for training cooperative learning competence, which Chinese students are much more lack of.Now that the traditional English teaching method has so many shortcomings, the students who have studied English with it can no longer keep pace with our fast moving society. So the Ministry of Education in China has constantly revised the syllabus of English teaching. In the recent syllabus, English learners are asked to develop their communicative abilities and comprehensive abilities in the target language. In order to make their teaching methods adjustable to the newly revised syllabus, the high school English teachers at present have begun to think about it and are improving their theoretical teaching proficiency by reading modern educational theories. Then they try to use these theories into their teaching practice. The author of this thesis keeps trying to find an adequate way to help her students improve their oral English proficiency. Ultimately, she finds that the interactive teaching method is one of the better ways to improve students’ oral English proficiency. It is worthy of recommending to all language teachers.Social constructivists think that knowledge is constructed by themselves. Students will master a foreign language when they communicate with other people with the target language. That means interaction plays an important role in acquiring a foreign language. The interactive teaching model puts students as the principal part in the class. All kinds of factors such as teachers, materials and surroundings also affect students’ language learning and knowledge construction. In order to explore the problem whether the interactive teaching model based on social constructivism would have a positive effect on improving students’ communicative competence, the author has conducted a four-month teaching experiment based on social constructivism. The purpose of the experiment is to create a circumstance that is suitable for constructing the meaning by the students themselves, and to train students’ critical thinking. The participants of the study are the students from Class 22 and Class 23 Grade One at Heping High School in Xian City. Before the experiment, the author analyzed oral English abilities of the students from Class 22 and Class 23. During the four-month experiment, the experiment group taught by the author received the interactive teaching model, while the traditional English teaching method was used in the controlled group. The author analyzed the data from the pre-test and post-test, calculated the mean and standard deviation of the marks and P value, and then drew the conclusions as follows:1. The interactive oral English teaching model can arouse students’ interests in using English for communicating.2. The interactive oral English teaching model has a positive effect on students’ English communicative abilities. |
