An empirical study of production-oriented approach in college english writing teaching

Abstract

Production-oriented approach"(POA) is a foreign language teaching theory put forward by Chinese professor Wen Qiufang and her team. The theoretical system of POA consists of teaching concept, teaching hypothesis and teaching process with the role of teachers' mediation, aiming at solving the problem of "separation between learning and using"and enhancing foreign language teaching effectiveness in college. The empirical experiment has been conducted in a university in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region for 15 weeks, and 110 sophomores of two parallel classes participate in the research with 55 students in each class. They are taught by the same teacher with the same teaching materials in both experimental class (EC) and control class (CC). The only difference is that EC is taught by POA, while CC is taught by traditional writing approach that is product writing approach (PWA). Furthermore, questionnaires and writing tests are implemented in CC and EC, as well as Statistic Package for Social Science (SPSS) 17.0 is used to collect and analyze data. The research reveals that POA is more effective to help students master English writing strategies than PWA. Meanwhile, POA is more capable to improve students' language accuracy and increase the output of targeted connectives significantly instead of syntactic complexity of clause in English writing. Regarding writing scores, there is no significant difference between CC and EC which is consistent with the research results gotten by Zhang [20]. At last, some insightful suggestions and implications are proposed for future study.