Abstract
Traditional language teaching method has been dominant in China’s middle school language classrooms for a long time although there has been great improvement in the study of EFL teaching in China. Under the influence of traditional methods, students receive language input in a passive way and have limited opportunities to produce comprehensible and effective language output. The traditional theory, practice, and testing model can hardly work effectively in accord with the need of social development. Modem language teaching and learning is student centered and it calls for students’ initiative and focuses on the process of learning rather than the pure study of teaching methods and techniques. As a new tendency, classroom interaction has been studied and observed by a lot of scholars, but most of such studies in China have been directed at language classrooms on the university or college level with its major focus on classroom discourse analysis. Since such research data are quite limited, more relevant studies should be made on the middle school level with amore varied perspective.
With the help of Flanders Interaction Analysis System, this study observes various classroom speech activities as well as the types of questioning and the ways of giving feedbacks. It’s concluded that the IRF model is still dominant in the language classroom and that teachers’ speech amount exceeds that of students. Most of the time, students are passively involved in classroom activities. Their awareness of active learning should be activated. Therefore, the final part of the paper puts forward some suggestions on how to enhance classroom interaction and improve students’ classroom involvement, so that their learning motivation can be stimulated and their language competence can be further developed.
Keywords: classroom interaction; interaction patterns; learning initiative; student-centered teaching
Contents
Abstract
摘 要
1. Introduction-1
1.1 Background of the Study-1
1.2 Significance of the Study-1
1.3 Outline of the Thesis-2
2. Literature Review-3
2.1 Interaction-3
2.2 Classroom Interaction-3
2.3 Teacher-student Interaction-3
2.3.1 Definition of Teacher-student Interaction-3
2.3.2 Previous Approaches to Teacher-student Interaction Analysis-4
2.4 Theoretical Basis-5
2.4.1 Interaction Hypothesis-5
2.4.2 Krashen’s Input Hypothesis-6
2.4.3 Swain’s Output Hypothesis-6
2.4.4 Swain’s Recent Notion: Output in Dialogue-7
2.4.5 Cooperative Learning-8
3. Characteristics of Classroom Interaction-9
3.1 The Student-centered in Interactive Subjects-9
3.2 The Communicative Tasks in Interactive contents-9
3.3 The Group Activities in Interactive pattern-9
4. Classroom Observation and Analysis-10
4.1 Purpose-10
4.2 Subjects-10
4.3 Instrument-10
4.4 Procedure-10
4.5 Date Analysis-11
5. Conclusion-12
5.1 Findings-12
5.2 Problems-12
5.3 Strategies-13
5.4 Limitations-13
References-14
Appendix-15
