Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
1.1.1 The Present Situation of Intensive Reading Teaching for Non-English Majors
经常阅读的学术文献和能力来表达自己的能力和正确的英语是最重要的技能，大学生必须在大学英语学习期间实现。精读一直是大学英语教学的一种重要的综合英语课程。作为大学英语教师，我们应该在密集阅读教室，帮助学生掌握这些技能。然而，在实际的指令精读，一些严重的问题，阻碍大学生掌握这些技能，这是体现如下：The capability to read the academic literatures and the ability to express ourselvesfrequently and correctly in English are the most significant skills that college studentsmust achieve in the period of college English learning. Intensive reading has been animportant comprehensive English course in college English instruction. As collegeEnglish teachers, we should help our students acquire these skills in the intensivereading classrooms. In the practical instruction of intensive reading, however, someserious issues hinder college students from grasping these skills, which are embodied asfollows:
a）根据“大学英语教学大纲（1999年）的指导下，到一个比较高的水平，听，说，写，译到一个中间水平的能力的大学英语教学的目的是培养学生的阅读能力。大学英语教师更要重视阅读教学，培养学生的阅读理解能力。然而，解释一下使用的词汇，语法和句法功能精读教学中占据了主要部分，但不教阅读技巧。根据李晓慧（2003年），理解练习低于19％和8％，分别在两个精读课本，其中之一是由上海外语教育出版社出版的大学英语和其他指toTwenty一世纪大学英语由复旦大学出版社出版。换句话说，精读教材，在一定程度上，放置学生的语言知识的能力，阅读理解能力，在首席的位置，而不是能力。a) Under the guidance of the College English Syllabus (1999), the objective ofcollege English instruction is to develop students’ reading competence into a relativelyhigh level, the competence of listening and speaking, writing and translation into anintermediate level. College English teachers should pay more attention to readinginstruction and cultivate students’ reading comprehension ability. However, theexplanation about the usage of vocabulary, grammar and the syntactic features occupiesthe main part of intensive reading instruction, but not teaching reading skills. Accordingto Li Xiaohui (2003), the exercises of comprehension take less than 19% and 8%respectively in two intensive reading textbooks, one of which is College Englishpublished by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, and the other refers toTwenty-first Century College English published by Fudan University Press. In other words, teaching materials of intensive reading, to some extent, place the students’proficiency in linguistic knowledge, instead of the ability of reading comprehension, inthe chief position.
b) Students stand in the different levels of English proficiency in the large-classintensive reading teaching, which is really difficult for teachers to organize classactivities by using the traditional teaching method. According to Jeremy Harmer (2000),it is impossible for teachers to establish the contact with all the students and hard forstudents to claim and obtain the inpidual attention in large-class teaching. It meansthat in the large-class teaching, if a teacher adopts the traditional teaching method,students cannot earn enough opportunities to interact with the teacher or their peers inEnglish.
c) The intensive reading teaching is traditionally dominated by English teachers.And most college English instructors consider helping students pass the college Englishtests like CET4 and CET6, which are composed to test whether students can grasp theusage of English masterly, as their instructional objective. So much of the instructionaltime is used in illustrating the usage of language points including key phrases andgrammar, analyzing the complicated sentence structures, and translating the indigestiblesentences and paragraphs; whereas students just listen to their teacher intently and takenotes carefully. They have few opportunities to speak English to enhance theircommunicative competence. Even though they obtain the chances, these chances stillare limited to the questions asked by the teacher, to which they can find the answers inthe text. Through this kind of instruction, students cannot learn how to use the languageexcept the usage of language. In other words, a lot of domestic college students cananalyze the grammatical structures and translate the passages, but most of them are poorat expressing themselves frequently and correctly in English.
Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter will review the literatures bound up with the current study. Itintroduces the related knowledge about Interactive Approach, mainly containing thebasic concepts of interaction and Interactive Approach, and presents the principles ofthe Interactive Approach, coupled with types of interaction. Later the theoretical basesare provided for the application of the Interactive Approach to college intensive readingteaching before the introduction about the researches of Interactive Approach abroadand at home.
2.1 Overview of Interactive Approach
2.1.1 The Concepts of Interaction
With respect to the word “interaction”, different scholars provide us with differentdefinitions. These influential ones will help us acquire a deep understanding ofInteractive Approach.Wells (1981) expresses it: “Linguistic interaction refers to a collaborative activityin which a triangular bond is built by the addresser, the recipient and the situationcontext”. It refers to a process in which two people or more than two people exchangeideas, transfer information and influence each other. It principally reflects the two-waycommunication: one wants to talk with the other, and the other person responds on thebasis of having interest in and pay attention to what one person says. Rivers in thepreface to a book named Interactive Language Teaching (2000) points out thatcommunication is our major goal as language teachers. Communication derivesessentially from interaction. Apparently, the two-way communication will realize personal information exchange.Brown (1994) defines interaction as follows: Interaction is thecooperative exchange of thoughts, feelings, or ideas between two or morepeople leading to a reciprocal influence on one another. Theories ofcommunicative proficiency stress the significance of interaction when weapply language in all kinds of contexts to ‘negotiate’ meaning, or simplynarrate, to make your idea into the head of another person or vise versa.
3. Research Design and Methodology........... 27-33
3.1 Research questions......... 27
3.2 Participants .........27-28
3.3 Instruments......... 28-29
3.3.1 The writing experiment......... 28
3.3.2 Questionnaire......... 28-29
3.4 Procedures .........29-31
3.5 Data collection .........31-33
3.5.1 Data collection from students' compositions......... 31-32
3.5.2 Data collection from the questionnaire .........32-33
4. Results and Discussion.........33-48
4.1 Results and analysis on the writing experiment......... 33-38
4.2 Results and analysis on questionnaire .........38-48
5. Conclusion .........48-55
5.1 Major findings of the present study .........48-50
5.2 Implications.........50-52
5.2.1 Theoretical implications......... 50
5.2.2 Practical implications .........50-52
5.3 Limitations of the present study and suggestions.........52-55
Conclusion
Even though this current study gives supports to two questions mentioned inchapter three, there still exist some limitations in this study. In this study, only 60students engage in the experiment. Besides, this empirical study was carried out in ashort duration and lasted 18 weeks. The short duration and small sample size keep theresearcher from making the stronger claim on the production of the findings and theevaluation about the effectiveness of applying this teaching approach in Englishintensive reading classroom.
Even though this empirical study identifies the effects of applying the InteractiveApproach to college English intensive reading teaching, some suggestions will bepresented to the future research in this field.The research could be carried out in the next term later and students in the currentresearch are also selected as the participants. The objective of the research is toinvestigate whether applying the Interactive Approach in the intensive reading teachingfor non-English majors can facilitate students’ reading proficiency and communicativecompetence, and cultivate their interest and intrinsic motivation in English studies if they are exposed to the interactive intensive reading teaching in a longer period of time.The Interactive Approach could be applied to other aspects of college Englishinstruction such as listening, writing and etc, so as to enhance college students’comprehensive English proficiency.It is strongly suggested that more researches on the application of InteractiveApproach to college English classroom teaching should be carried out with a larger sizeof subjects and with a longer period of time to fulfill more valid conclusions.
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