Abstract:

The Production-Oriented Approach (POA) is an innovative pedagogy with Chinese features first proposed by Wen Qiufang (2007), a Chinese scholar who insists that foreign language teaching could benefit from output-driven practices in the classroom. POA aims to overcome the problem of the separation of input from the output prevalent in English instruction in Chinese tertiary education, thereby improving the efficiency of classroom instruction and optimizing students’ learning. In the past decade, the POA has been put to practice by many teachers and researchers, with initial findings showing that it is feasible and effective for English teaching and learning at colleges and universities. The overall objective of this research is to apply POA to the English course for non-English major postgraduates in China by integrating the strengths of Western instructional approaches with Chinese contextual features in three aspects:
(a) teaching principles;
(b) teaching hypotheses; and
(c) teacher-mediated teaching processes.

The research covers all three aspects by first conducting studies on how to carry out the teaching principles in terms of ‘learning-centered’, ‘learning-using integration’, and ‘whole-person education’ to establish an effective teaching guideline and goal. The teaching hypotheses are then constituted in terms of ‘output-drive’, ‘input-enabling’, ‘selective learning’ and ‘learning promotion driven by evaluation’. And finally the teaching processes are accomplished in three phases, each mediated by the teacher: motivating, enabling, and assessing. The research reveals the perceived effectiveness of teaching mode with the application of POA but at the same time exposes some specific problems related to the credibility and validity of formative evaluation, which are expected to be solved in future research.

Keywords:

Production-oriented approach (POA), postgraduates' public English class, teaching principles, teaching hypotheses, teacher-mediated teaching processes.