The Production-Oriented Approach Updated: Introduction to the Special Issue

Shuguang Sun

doi:10.1515/CJAL-2020-0017

Article

The Production-Oriented Approach Updated: Introduction to the Special Issue

Shuguang Sun
Shuguang Sun, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Beijing Sport University. Her research interests are language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and assessment.

Published/Copyright: October 13, 2020

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From the journal Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics Volume 43 Issue 3

Abstract

More than a decade has passed since Wen Qiufang (2007) first proposed that foreign language teaching could benefit from output-driven practices in the classroom. Her original ideas were reformulated and further elaborated in the Production-Oriented Approach (POA), which aims to deal with the input-output separation in foreign language teaching in Chinese universities and colleges to optimize students’ learning (Wen, 2015, 2016b). Integrating the strengths of Chinese traditional pedagogy and Western instructional approaches, this approach engages learners with production, merging the learning and use of language to enhance the efficiency of language teaching (Illes, 2018, p. 242) in a Chinese context.

This introduction to the special issues includes three major sections. It starts out with an overview of what the POA system includes and how it works with a focus on its teaching procedures. The second section is about dialectical research (DR), a new research paradigm specifically designed for instructed second language acquisition (Wen, 2017b) with “dialectical materialism as its philosophical basis” (Wen, 2019, p. 385). Finally, seven papers collected in this issue are introduced. We hope that this special issue sets a research agenda towards a better understanding of the POA.

Keywords: Production-Oriented Approach; foreign language teaching; dialectical research

¹ This article was sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Key Project at Key Research Centers of the Ministry of Education in China (16JJD740002) and by the Tenth China’s Foreign Language Education Fund (ZGWYJYJJ10Z025).

About the author

Shuguang Sun

Shuguang Sun, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Beijing Sport University. Her research interests are language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and assessment.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Wen Qiufang for her constructive comments and Vera Lee for her comprehensive editing that helped improve earlier drafts of this article. My sincere gratitude also goes to the editors for their valuable suggestions.

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Published Online: 2020-10-13

Published in Print: 2020-09-25

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https://doi.org/10.1515/CJAL-2020-0017

Keywords for this article

Production-Oriented Approach; foreign language teaching; dialectical research