A Study Of The Effects Of Production-Oriented Approach On Secondary Vocational School Students’ Writing Competence

The present study aims at investigating the effects of production-oriented approach(POA)on the secondary vocational school students’writing competence.The theoretical basis of this study is the teaching hypothesis of POA,namely Output-driven Hypothesis,Input-enabled Hypothesis,Selective Learning Hypothesis and Assessment as Learning.The significance of the study lies in providing some new insights into POA,helping enrich existing writing theories,especially for secondary vocational schools,and offering valuable pedagogical suggestions to English teachers.The present work attempts to address the following questions:1.What effects does the production-oriented approach have on secondary vocational students’writing accuracy in English writing?2.What effects does the production-oriented approach have on secondary vocational students’ writing fluency in English writing?3.What effects does the production-oriented approach have on secondary vocational students’ writing complexity in English writing?This study adopted both quantitative research and qualitative research.The participants of this investigation consist of 84 students from two parallel classes of Grade One at a secondary vocational school in Nantong City,Jiangsu Province who were taught by the researcher and had similar English background and English level.Traditional teaching method was adopted in Class 4 Grade 1,the control class,while POA was employed in Class 6 Grade 1,the experimental class.The instruments applied in this study include two writing tests and an interview.Before the experiment,a pretest was carried out in the two classes and there was no significant difference in students’ writing accuracy,fluency and complexity.In the experiment,the traditional writing teaching method was adopted in the Control Class(CC),students completed corresponding writing exercises,and then corrected by the teacher.POA teaching method was adopted in the experimental class(EC),it carried out English writing teaching according to the three core links of "motivating-enabling-assessing".After 8 weeks of study,the two classes had a posttest.The collected data was analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The qualitative research adopts the semi-structured interview method,and the interviewees were 6 students from the experimental class.The data were then collected,transcribed into English,analyzed and categorized to complement and verify the reasons POA had any or no effects on secondary vocational school students’ writing competenceBy analysis,certain conclusions are drawn as followsFirstly,POA can help students improve accuracy and fluency of writing.In terms of accuracy,from the comparison results of the posttest,the mean of the EC is 0.722 and the mean of the CC is 0.554.The Independent-sample t-test has showed that there is a significant difference in the accuracy of writing between the two classes(p=0.000).The mean of the pretest and posttest of the EC is 0.558 and 0.722 respectively.The Paired-sample t-test shows that there is a significant difference between the pretest and posttest in the writing accuracy of the EC(p=0.000).In terms of fluency,from the comparison results of the posttest,the mean of the EC is 11.051 and the mean of the CC is 8.176,the Independent-sample t-test shows that there is a significant difference in the fluency of writing between the two classes(p=0.000).The mean of the pretest is 9.100 and the mean of the posttest is 11.051.The paired sample t-test shows that there is a significant difference(p=0.000)in the writing fluency of the EC before and after the experiments,and the students’ writing fluency has been significantly improvedSecondly,POA has not yet significantly improved the complexity of writing.In terms of complexity,from the comparison results of the posttest,the mean of the EC is 1.131 and the mean of the CC is 1.118,the Independent-sample t-test shows that there is no significant difference in the complexity of writing between the two classes(p=0.311).The mean value of the pretest and posttest of the experimental class is 1.120 and 1.131 respectively.The paired sample t-test shows that there is no significant difference in the complexity of the writing of the pretest and posttest of the experimental class(p=0.481),which may be due to the low English level of secondary vocational students and their limited grasp of complex sentence patterns.Furthermore,students have focused more on avoiding grammar and spelling mistakes rather than proper use of complex sentence patterns.Thirdly,compared with the traditional teaching methods,POA has worked better in improving students’ overall English writing competence.In the posttest,the average score of the CC is 11.590 and the same of the EC is 13.951.The independent samples t-test shows the significant difference of writing scores between the two classes(p=0.005),which reveals that students taught by POA have performed much better in English writing than those guided by the traditional teaching methodThis study has certain pedagogical implications.First,English teachers should flexibly apply the production-oriented approach in writing class and design English courses suitable for the development of secondary vocational students based on PO A theory.Second,teachers should also make adjustments according to actual situation when applying POA to secondary vocational school English writing teaching.More particularly,difficulty of students’ learning task should be moderate in line with their current development level where challenges still exist.Last but not least,teachers may communicate with students,observe the students’ use of writing language,and constantly adjust writing teaching methods.