Abstract
With effective learning as its core principle, Production-oriented Approach (POA) was developed to address the problems of English classroom instruction in China, such as text-centeredness, the separation of learning and using and “dumb English”. This study applied POA to college English classroom instruction in order to examine its effects on English learning and explore its implications for English instruction in the EFL context. Twenty-two second-year students majoring in Applied English in a Sino-US cooperative education program participated in the study. Data were collected through questionnaires distributed to the students at the end of each unit and the semester, and semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants to elicit information about students’ motivation, engagement, reflections upon their learning process, and perceptions on the POA class. A variety of assessment tools, including the Teacher-Student Collaborative Assessment approach, were applied to evaluate students’ performance and progress. The study revealed that POA played a positive role in stimulating students’ learning motivation and enhancing students’ communicative competence, especially in speaking and writing. However, the implementation of POA should also be adapted to learner’s variables and needs so that POA can realize its values and create successful results in practice. 
Highlights
1.1 Background of the Present StudyEnglish classroom instruction in Chinese universities has undergone rounds of reforms over the past decades
The study indicated that the application of Production-oriented Approach (POA) in college English instruction changed the old mindsets of teaching and learning on both teachers and students and played a positive role in enhancing students’ engagement, communicative competence, and application abilities
To overcome the weakness of the above three hypotheses and adapt them to Chinese settings, Wen (2015) developed a series of hypotheses of POA which consists of the out-driven hypothesis (ODH), input-enabled hypothesis (IEH), selective learning hypothesis (SLH)
Summary
English classroom instruction in Chinese universities has undergone rounds of reforms over the past decades. The English teaching modes in China’s higher education has shifted from teacher-centeredness to learners-centeredness, text-oriented approach to communication-oriented approach, and teaching English for general purposes (EGP) to teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) These methodologies, most of which are based on SLA theories, met constraints in China’s context even though they had contributed to the development of English teaching in China to some extent at different times. Teachers are faced with challenges such as large class sizes, lack of advanced pedagogical knowledge, lack of practical assessment tools, deep-rooted examination-oriented classroom culture, etc In this context, POA was initiated by Professor Wen (2015) to tackle these problems such as separation of learning and using, “high investment and low effectiveness”(Cai, 2006), and “dumb English”(Dai, 2001) in English classroom instruction in China, aiming to improve students’ productive ability, knowledge application ability and overall humanistic qualities
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