An Action Research On Production-Oriented Approach In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

Production-Oriented Approach(POA)is a Chinese TEFL approach constructed by Chinese scholar,Wen Qiufang.Based on theories of second language acquisition at home and abroad and English instructional circumstances in China,POA aims to solve pressing problem of “learning-using isolation” in English instruction in China.Many researchers have conducted theoretical and empirical studies on POA and show that POA increases the production level of language usage and stimulates students' desire to learn English writing.But few action researches are on high school English education.Present research tried to solve following problems at practical level in high school classroom: 1)Is POA effective in high school English writing teaching as well? 2)Does POA have a positive effect on the learning motivations to high school students? 3)How to handle the challenges in the course of this research,in order to adapt POA for high school English writing teaching?Present thesis was carried out to 52 high school freshmen for 14 weeks through a three-round action research to explore the application of POA in high school's English writing class.Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed during and after each action round,aiming to guide the practice of POA and to optimize the POA theory with practical information and reflections gained from the action research.During the first round of action research,according to the teaching principles and teaching procedures of POA,4 principles were applied to deal with high school's English teaching materials.They were: 1)whole analysis and selective learning integrated principle;2)communicative,valuable and material supportive principle;3)explicit and specific principle;4)suitable degree of difficulty and scaffold principle.During the second round,it reconstructed and elaborated the teaching procedures of POA to adjust the instruction pace in high school,which added tasks and objectives for the whole unit and each class was subdivided into three teaching cycles,which were motivating,enabling and assessing.As for the third round,in order to improve high school English writing teaching in POA effectively,it optimized and elaborated each teaching procedure: 1)The motivation cycle included clear learning guides and background knowledge supporting principle for motivating;2)Four visualization methods were applied effectively to process input materials for enabling;3)“Assessing” should assess students' compositions and consolidate what students had learned before by following the systematical and circular principle.Due to the lack of the depth of study and the limitation of circumstance and subjects,the present research still has room to improve.