A Study On The Application Of Production-oriented Approach In The Teaching Of College English Writing

According to the "College English Curriculum Requirements" promulgated by Ministry of Education in 2007,the orientation of college English courses on talent training is to cultivate students’ practical communicative competence and comprehensive application skills in listening,speaking,reading,writing and translation.While how to improve college students’ writing abilities has always been an inevitable puzzle in college English teaching for such a long time.In many cases,due to the limitation of teaching time or the dissatisfaction of teachers’ guiding way,improving students’ writing abilities seems to be a weak part virtually in English—students’ productive skills are relatively poor and their expression abilities are also weak,so their writing performance can be difficult to have substantial improvement.Under such situation,The "Production-oriented Approach"(POA)has been put forward by Wen(2015).The POA combines "input learning" and productive using" closely and they interact mutually.It advocates "learning-centered principle","learning-using integrated principle" and "whole-person education principle".The teaching hypotheses contain "output-driven hypothesis","input-enabled hypothesis","selective learning hypothesis" and "promoting learning through assessing hypothesis".The teaching process contains three phases,each guided by the teacher:"motivating","enabling",and "assessing".All of these have broadened our thoughts of English writing teaching.Based on the POA theory,the present research attempts to explore the effectiveness of the POA on writing teaching through an empirical research,in such way,it is possible to construct a new model for college English writing teaching.The research subjects were two natural classes of non-English major students in North China Electric Power University.Students’ English language abilities both in Experimental Class(EC)and Controlled Class(CC)have already reached at A2 level or above according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages(2009).Both of the teaching in EC and CC were undertaken by the author.As for writing teaching,the CC adopted traditional English intensive reading teaching method,while the EC adopted the teaching method under the guidance of the POA.The experiment has lasted nearly 16 weeks.The research methods contained writing tests,questionnaires and interview,and the research data were analyzed by SPSS19.0 software.The research results are summarized as follows:Firstly,compared with the traditional intensive writing teaching method,writing teaching method based on the POA was more effective.Under such teaching approach,students have made more significant progress in writing test.Secondly,students basically held positive attitudes towards writing teaching method based on the POA,and they had proved to be more active in writing class.Although the present research has tested the validity of writing teaching approach based on the POA to some extent,it also had some shortcomings due to the limitation of the objective conditions.Aiming at these limitations,some pedagogical suggestions were provided for college English writing teaching in the research.