The Application Of POA In Teaching Of English Writing In Senior Middle Schools

The production-oriented approach(POA)is a pedagogical theory with Chinese characteristics that was put forward by Professor Wen Qiufang from Beijing Foreign Studies University who led a POA research team.The theory inherits the good tradition of education in our country,and draws on the essence of foreign language teaching theory and practice,which aims to reverse the negative tendency in Chinese foreign language instruction with too much emphasis on learning language whilst ignoring using or with too much emphasis on using language whilst ignoring learning.After nearly a decade of theoretical exploration and several rounds of teaching practice,the theoretical system and implementation path of the POA have been basically formed hitherto.Furthermore,the POA consists of three components: teaching principles,teaching hypotheses and teacher-mediated teaching processes.The teaching principles include learning-centered principle,learning-using integration principle,and whole-person education principle;the teaching hypotheses are composed of output-driven hypothesis,input-enabled hypothesis and selective learning hypothesis.The teaching processes contain three phases,motivating,enabling,and assessing,each mediated by the teacher.The relationship among the three components is as follows: the three principles set guidelines for the other two components;the three hypotheses serve as a theoretical basis for the teaching process;the three-phase teaching process reflects and illustrates the principles while testing the hypotheses;the teacher-mediated effects embody every phase of teaching process.The research tries to apply the POA to writing instruction in senior middle school for the purpose of handling the following two research questions:1)Does the POA’s application improve students’ productive capacity in writing?2)How effectively can POA be applied in writing instruction in senior middle school?The study attempts to use the POA to conduct a unit teaching referring to a one-week experiment.The research subject are senior students of Grade 2 from Zhengzhou No.2 Middle School.Accordingly the productive task is designed to write an argumentation related to the topic of the unit,based on the linguistic items students are going to learn and master in this unit.Using quantitative and qualitative research methods,the students’ writing productive capacities are measured after the data is collected.Consequently SPSS 17.0 is used for data analysis within groups and between groups.At the same time,students and teachers are interviewed respectively to discuss their personal psychological feelings and actual changes during the instruction experiment.The major findings of the study are as follows:(1)The POA can improve the quality of language production by means of learning in the phase of enabling.(2)The POA can offer more language opportunities in the phase of instruction,which is beneficial for students to enhance their language production in various ways.(3)The POA can stimulate students’ positive emotional experience,which is notable in reducing the anxiety of students and activating their learning interests.