An Empirical Study Of The Cultivation Of Academic English Listening And Speaking Ability Based On The Production-oriented Approach

The development of economic globalization and the growing demand of internationalization of tertiary education has deepened academic exchanges across cultures,which make it increasingly significant to cultivate college students' academic English listening and speaking ability.However,few mature teaching models or empirical findings so far could be used for reference.The “Production-oriented Approach”(POA)constructed by Wen Qiufang advocates that output serves as a driving force for language learning and output-driven learning with input-enabling process can lead to better outcomes.With the primary aim of overcoming the weakness of separating language learning from using or stressing language using over language learning in the English instruction in China,the POA has attracted attention home and abroad since put forward in 2014 and has been put to practice and achieved preliminary positive effects in many universities.This study attempts to apply the POA to academic English listening and speaking teaching and testify its effectiveness by both quantitative and qualitative research methods.Two research questions are to be addressed:(1)What is the effect of the POA on the cultivation of college students' academic English listening ability,specifically students' academic English listening comprehension ability and note-taking skills?(2)What is the effect of the POA on the cultivation of students' academic English speaking ability,especially students' communicative strategies,communicative functions and practical competence of academic English speaking?The author selected 158 students from two parallel classes of non-English-majors with advanced English proficiency of 2017 in Shandong Normal University as participants(77 in experimental class,81 in control class)and conducted a 15-week teaching experiment and both classes were taught by the same teacher.The teaching of the experimental class was under the guidance of the POA,highlighting theintegration of “output-driven” and “input-enabling” and teachers' leading and scaffolding role in the teaching process;while in the control class,the teaching processes and teaching materials were consistent with those of the experimental class except for the lack of “output-driven” “input-enabling” and other core phases of the POA.The author did classroom observation in two classes and distributed reflective journals in the experimental class.At the end of experiment,a post-test,post-questionnaire and an interview were conducted,and the results were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively by SPSS 17.0,followed by a descriptive analysis of the productive text of Unit 7 oral communicative task of New Century College English Listening and Notetaking Skills,Book?.The results show that:(1)The academic English listening performance of the experimental class is significantly better than that of the control class,and in terms of note-taking skills,students in the experimental class could use abbreviations,time lines or other skills more flexibly when taking shorthand.(2)Compared with control class,students in the experimental class could use relevant communication strategies such as discussion,clarification,etc.,more accurately and appropriately,and better accomplished the communicative functions like defining,categorizing etc.,and as to practical competence of academic English speaking,their productive text of oral communicative task was more prominent in language accuracy,richness and structural rationality.Finally,according to the findings of the study,the author put forward some suggestions for the application of the POA to academic English listening and speaking teaching,together with the limitations of this study and some pieces of advice for further research.