A Study On The Application Of Production-oriented Approach To Vocational College English Teaching

The “Production-oriented Approach(POA)” is a new teaching theory which is put forward by professor Wen Qiufang.It aims at changing the current situation of Chinese foreign language teaching,which emphasizes input but ignores the cultivation of students’ output ability.The POA lays stress on the functions of output in the work.It takes the “output” both as teaching objective and the motivating method.Meanwhile,it regards the “input” activities as enabling approaches of the teaching objectives.This new teaching approach combines input and output effectively.At present,the outcome of English instruction in the higher vocational colleges is unsatisfactory.Consequently,in order to solve this dilemma,this study attempts to apply the POA to the vocational college English teaching,so as to check whether the POA can promote students’ English proficiency.In this study,the following questions are addressed.(1)Does the application of the POA promote students’ English output ability?(2)Does the application of the POA promote students’ overall English proficiency?After the pre-test,two classes majoring in Accounting in ShanDong Youth University of Political Science are selected as the participants.The results of the pre-test has shown that these two classes involved in the study are at the same level in output ability and overall English proficiency.During the teaching experiment,the POA is adopted in the Experimental Class and the traditional teaching mode is applied to the Control Class.The teaching experiment lasts for 16 weeks.After the teaching experiment,post-tests and interview are carried out in these two classes to figure out whether the application of the POA has promoted the students’ English proficiency.Through the comparison and analysis of the research result,conclusion can be drawn:(1)The application of the POA has promoted students’ output ability.As for the specific aspects of output ability,the results have shown that the achievements of the EC are better than those of the CC in oral English and writing.In translation,both the EC and the CC have made progress.However,the scores of translation in the EC is alittle lower than that of the CC.(2)The application of the POA is effective in improving students’ overall English proficiency.The results indicate that the EC has got better scores than the CC in overall English proficiency after the teaching experiment.Besides,through the interview,the author finds out that the students in the EC are inclined to have a positive attitude to the current teaching mode.Finally,the author presents the implications gained from the study.In addition,suggestions for future studies are given based on the research results.Although there are some limitations in this study,it provides references for the reform of English teaching in higher vocational colleges.