An Empirical Study On Production-oriented Approach In College Oral English Teaching

The present study is basically the application of production-oriented approach in college oral English teaching.The production-oriented approach is the first teaching approach with Chinese characteristics.It is put forward by Professor Wen Qiufang.This approach mainly includes three parts: 1)teaching principles;2)teaching hypotheses;3)teacher-mediated teaching procedures.The teaching principles include learning-centered,learning-using integration,and whole-person education.The teaching hypotheses include output-driven hypotheses,input-enabled hypotheses,and selective learning hypotheses.Teaching procedures have three stages: motivating,enabling,and assessing.The main purpose of this study is to find out the effects of production-oriented approach on students' oral production,especially in terms of fluency,accuracy and appropriacy.Then,the study aims to find out students' attitudes towards the approach.The subjects in the current study come from the listening and speaking classes of Zhengzhou University.They are from two parallel classes and there are 58 students in total.There are 28 students in one class,which is considered as the experiment class,and the other control class,30 students.The experimental treatment lasts for 12 weeks.Besides,in order to minimize the influences of other variables on the results,these two classes are taught by the same teacher.In terms of instruments in the study,pretest,post-test and the questionnaire are involved.Then,the collected data are processed and analyzed with the help of the SPSS.The study finds that students' oral production both in experiment class and control class has improved after a semester's teaching.The post-test results show that the score of experimental class improved higher than that of control class,which demonstrates that production-oriented approach has produced positive effects on students' oral production.Furthermore,production-oriented approach has a significant influence on fluency and accuracy in particular.But there is no significant difference in the oral production ability of appropriacy.The results of the questionnaire show that production-oriented approach has positive influences on students' learning principles and attitudes.Students show their satisfactory towards the production-oriented approach.This empirical study is an active exploration of the effectiveness of the Production-oriented approach in English teaching for non-English majors.It is hoped that the findings can provide some evidence for the improvement of this approach.