A Research On Application Of Production-Oriented Approach In College Oral English Teaching

POA(Production-oriented approach)is a theoretical system which integrates strengths of SLA theories in western countries with contextual features of English teaching in China.It mainly aims to improve English classroom instruction at the tertiary level in Mainland China.This paper tries to apply POA to English teaching for the purpose of testing whether the POA is effective on improving students' oral English.The research employs DR(Dialectical research)and collects data by class observation,students' journals,oral tests and so on.The duration of this research is two semesters,and 62 sophomores from one class are subjects.Due to intertwined relation between theory and practice in DR,i.e.,practice is primary and theory is derived from practice.The present research is conducted in a real teaching situation and both the researcher and the teacher take part in teaching practice.There are three cycles in the present research.The main purpose of cycle one is applying POA to real teaching and figuring out whether it can be feasible and effective to improve oral English teaching.So cycle one designs a unit on basis of POA theoretical system and puts it into teaching practice.The preliminary trial delivers good results obtained from students' feedback including arousing students' learning interests,improving students' engagement and enabling students accomplish oral task with high quality.But some deficiencies are also revealed,among which assessing is the biggest one.Then improving assessing is naturally set as the goal of the second cycle.Through learning,practising and interpreting,a framework of TSCA(Teacher-students collaborative assessment)assessing oral English products works out.In cycle three,improving motivating phase of POA by well-designed initial trails is the research focus.And at last,a feasible way of motivating is explored and introduced to oral English teaching by practice.Before and after three research cycles,students take part in a pre-test and a post-test which are held to figure out whether POA can improve students' oral proficiency by comparing and analyzing the results of the oral tests.Students' speaking proficiency is evaluated from the following four aspects: Naturalness and Abundance,Development and Adaptability,Interactivity,Pronunciation and Grammar.It turns out that POA has a positive effect on improving students' speaking proficiency of English,especially with evident effect on Naturalness and Abundance,Development and Adaptability as well as Interactivity.Meanwhile,the research investigated students' attitudes toward POA by collecting and analyzing students' journals.Obviously,POA is accepted and welcomed by the majority of them.Lastly,this paper puts forward several suggestions in light of the limitations of the present research which includes doing diachronic research,constructing testing system aiming at POA and exploring how to help students in different English levels improve by teaching based no POA,hoping to provide some experiences and inspirations to college English teachers or researchers who have interests in POA.