An Exploratory Reform in Separation of Teaching and Examination for Postgraduate Academic English Course Based on POA

Abstract

Based on the survey of academic English abilities and learning needs of non-English major postgraduates at Inner Mongolia University, China. The study explores the curriculum reform scheme of general academic English for postgraduates under the guidance of Production-oriented Approach, and carries out the separation reform in teaching and examination of postgraduate academic English. The teaching concept of “promoting learning with pragmatic purpose” in Production-oriented Approach (POA) is applied to the teaching of graduate students’ academic English writing. Combined with computer technology and related products developed by Beijing Tianyan Rongzhi Software Co., Ltd., a number of open question banks conforming to POA summative evaluation are constructed, and the POA teaching evaluation model is applied to the summative assessment of the course. The results indicate that the new teaching model based on POA realizes the transformation of students from merely learning English to pragmatically using English. The academic writing task assigned by the teacher promotes postgraduates to earnestly apply what they have learned in class to practice, which is of great help to their writing academic abstracts and research papers in English, and greatly enhances their confidence in reading English literature and publishing English academic papers independently. The curriculum assessment adopting separation between teaching and examination enables students to show more initiative to expand their academic knowledge and their English thinking while learning the classroom content, so that the cases of getting high scores via a frantic last-minute effort will be apparently reduced, and the assessment for their achievements in the course will become more efficient and fair.