A Study Of The Effects Of POA On Senior High School Students’ Argumentative Writing Performance

Production-oriented Approach(POA for short hereafter)was formally proposed by Professor Wen Qiufang in 2014 in order to solve the problems of separating learning a foreign language from using it,and the inefficiency in foreign language teaching in Chinese colleges.Since it was proposed,many scholars have applied it to different aspects of foreign language teaching at tertiary level,trying to enhance students’ English competency,but few scholars have combined POA with the teaching of English argumentative writing in senior high schools.In this study,the author tries to apply POA to high schools to explore whether or not it can exert some effects on students’ argumentative writing in English when the experimental class and the control class are taught by different teaching approaches.The main research questions are as follows:(1)Compared with the traditional writing teaching method,what is the effect of POA on the content of senior high school students’ argumentative writing?(2)Compared with the traditional writing teaching method,what is the effect of POA on the discourse structure of senior high school students’ argumentative writing?(3)Compared with the traditional writing teaching method,what is the effect of POA on the language form of senior high school students’ argumentative writing?Participants involved in our study were 108 students coming from two classes in the first grade of Yangzhou No.One Middle School.Class Three was assigned as the experimental class and Class Six the control class.This study took the experimental method,i.e.,through a two-month teaching experiment,to explore the effectiveness of POA on high school students’argumentative writing.POA was applied to the teaching of EC and the traditional teaching method was employed to the teaching in the CC.The research instrument involved a pre-test,a post-test and interviews.Before the teaching experiment,the author took the monthly test in September as the pre-test and analyzed the overall scores,the scores of the writing section in this monthly test,as well as the scores for the content,structure and language of the students’writing production,in order to find out whether or not there was significant difference in English comprehensive ability and writing ability between the EC and the CC.After two-month teaching,the researcher conducted the post-test in both classes and retrieved the scores for the overall writing,and the scores for the content,the structure and the language of students’writings.The overall scores of the compositions and the scores for the content,structure and language of students’ writings were compared and analyzed by SPSS 24.0,aiming to verify the effects of POA on argumentative writing in comparison with the traditional teaching approach in terms of improving the scores of senior high school students’ argumentative writing.An interview with six students randomly selected from the experimental class was conducted after the experiment.The interview was conducted in Chinese,and recorded and transcribed by the researcher for further analysis in order to find out the students’ evaluation and feedback on the POA and the teaching of argumentative writing.Analysis of the data collected yields the following three findings.Firstly,compared with traditional teaching approach,POA is more effective to improve the content of high school students’ argumentative writing.Through selective learning,they are able to form standpoints and argumentation more accurately and specifically.Secondly,compared with traditional teaching approach,POA has good impact on improving the structure of argumentative writing done by the high school students,which enables students write the essays in a clear and logic way.Thirdly,POA is much more effective since it improves the language of the argumentative writing in the comparison of traditional writing teaching approach.After the two-month teaching,they tend to use more advanced vocabulary and grammar.Our research has the following three pedagogical implications.First of all,POA is applicable and effective in terms of teaching argumentative writing to senior high school students.Secondly,the teacher-student collaborative assessment can help the students to reflect continuously on their own writing,which is beneficial to improve their writing.Finally,POA is significant in that it focuses on the teachers’ "scaffolding" role.They are to design the class activities creatively and select the input materials carefully,which are adapted to the writing topic.However,this teaching experiment included in our study inevitably has some limitations,such as limited duration,limited number of research subjects and the inexperience of the researcher,which may affect the conclusions generated from our research.At present,POA is not only applied to English language teaching,but also to the teaching of such languages as Korean and Chinese.Future studies of this kind can be conducted to explore the application and effectiveness of POA.