作者:校园英语杂志社 字数:3426 点击:

  【Abstract】College English, as a compulsory and fundamental part in the graduate study curriculum, aims to cultivate college students’ integrated English language competence, especially listening and speaking. For this very reason, POA (production-oriented approach) recently emerges as a popular teaching method in China. It not only focuses on producing process, but also on products students achieved. Therefore, this paper tends to discuss the rationale of POA and its practical application in college English course.
  【Key words】POA (production-oriented approach); rationale; college English course
  【作者簡介】高晴晴(1991.08-),女,汉族,安徽阜阳人,嘉兴学院南湖学院,讲师,研究方向:英语教学法、跨文化交际。
  1. Introduction
  Nowadays, college students account for a large part among English learners as an irreplaceable group of promoting potential economic prosperity. Therefore, it is still a demanding and urgent task for educators to innovate the college English course. For many years, compared with the English major courses, less significance is attached to the construction of college English and there exists several prominent drawbacks in this area. Firstly, despite some curriculum reforms, focusing on form plays a dominant role in the classroom which leads to excellent grammar and word memorisation but deficient communication ability. As a result, graduate students who have passed CET4 or CET6 still fail to communicate effectively in an authentic context to finish the meaning exchange. Secondly, due to some complex economic and political factors, a majority of schools still adopt traditional and boring ways to teach English such as note-taking, rote memorization and grammar translation which definitely hinder students’ creativity. Inevitably, the phenomenon of big classes which usually include sixty to seventy people causes lower learning efficiency. Lastly, textbook-centred model can’t target at efficient input to satisfy the increasing demands of contemporary students’ interests.
  Based on the problems,, POA appears a good option for teachers. Hence, this paper will briefly discuss the rationale of POA with example designs from textbook New Horizon College English (Third Edition) to demonstrate how this approach works in classroom settings. From the perspective of educators, it can deepen their understanding towards POA and help them enhance the practical teaching ability.
  2. An overview of the theoretical framework of POA
  A variety of teaching approaches have emerged in specific historical period considering the nature of language, learner needs as well as language learning theories. The emergence of production-oriented approach (POA) is not accidental as it has some similarities with the communicative language teaching (CLT) and task-based language teaching (TBLT) with the teaching focus on knowing how to use language meaningfully and properly in a specific context by using a good handle of language structures. The concept of POA was firstly put forward by Professor Wen Qiufang (Wen, 2015). There are three aspects in the theoretical basis of POA: teaching principles, teaching hypotheses, and teaching procedures (Wen, 2015).