Volume 43, Issue 3 - Special Issue on the Production-Oriented Approach Guest Editor: Shuguang SUN

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.

Motivating is the most creative phase of the Production-Oriented Approach (POA), making it different from other teaching approaches from the outset. This study aims to introduce the theory of motivating and its application to College English teaching practice by adopting dialectal research (DR). First, it gives an overall introduction to motivating, including its function, steps, and categories. Then it demonstrates two rounds of motivating practice in teaching College English by using the POA-based textbook iEnglish . The first round of motivating practice mainly focuses on how to follow the three steps of motivating in a specific case, namely, the teacher providing scenarios, the students trying out the productive activity, and the teacher explaining the productive objectives. The second round attempts to apply the criteria of motivating effectiveness to practice, namely, authentic communication, cognitive challenges and appropriate productive objectives. Furthermore, the teaching effectiveness of the motivating practice is appraised by both the teacher’s and students’ retrospective evaluations. Finally, some suggestions for motivating design and future research are proposed.

Enabling as the second phase of the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) instruction (Wen, 2015), plays a vital role in determining the quality of productive performance of English language learners. To explore how to apply theoretical principles of enabling to practice, this paper interprets theoretical principles and reports the practice of the classroom implementation of enabling. The paper proposes a definition for enabling, clarifies the confusion between enabling and scaffolding, and clears up some misunderstandings about enabling. It explains three criteria for effective enabling, namely, alignment, gradualness, and variety, and elaborates on the relations among them. Based on the teaching material of Unit 7 of iEnglish , the paper demonstrates how to design and implement enabling activities under the guidance of these three criteria and evaluates the actual effectiveness of the enabling implemented in the classroom.

Teacher-student collaborative assessment (TSCA) aims to address the challenges of responding to students’ work in the Production-Oriented Approach: low efficiency and poor effectiveness. As part of a bigger project carried out in a Chinese university over a period of three years, the present study explored how the teacher prepared and implemented TSCA in class, especially with a focus on how she determined the assessing objective and worked collaboratively with her students in class to achieve it, using the students’ written and translated texts as examples. By adopting the dialectical research (DR) method, this paper collected qualitative data such as teaching plans, classroom recordings, and reflective journals of the teacher-researcher (the author), along with students’ written drafts and translated texts. TSCA theory and classroom practice have been refined simultaneously by means of putting theory into practice and reflecting upon it. The optimized pre-class and in-class procedures may shed some light on applying TSCA to L2 classrooms.

The Production-Oriented Approach (POA) has been proposed as a remedy for overcoming the problem of input-output separation in the traditional text-centered teaching and learning paradigm in tertiary education in China. This two-week quasi-experimental study investigated the effect of the POA, compared with the traditional text-centered Intensive Reading Approach (IRA), on college students’ L2 writing performance in terms of overall quality of the writing and its components of language, idea, and discourse structure. Data included writing samples of both experimental and control groups before and after classroom instruction and the results of a language achievement test on mastery of target language forms predicating students’ language use in writing. The results showed that: 1) no significant difference was found between the two groups either in the overall quality or in the “idea” and “structure” of the written texts; 2) the experimental group outperformed the control group with respect to language use, in terms of both language quality and the frequency of target language use. These results indicated that the POA might have an advantage over the IRA in facilitating learners’ writing development.

It is noticeable that the academic papers written by Chinese English learners are lacking in academic features largely due to their poor ability to use nominalization. Therefore, the instruction of nominalization in an academic English writing course is badly needed. The author conducted one-semester-long instruction of nominalization to 90 non-English majors under the guidance of the production-oriented approach (POA). This research demonstrated how to apply POA, specifically, the enabling procedure to the teaching of nominalization. By triangulating the data of students’ interviews, learning journals and written output, and the data of 4 teachers’ class observations and interviews, this study found that the accurate application of the three criteria of effective enabling contributed to the improvement of the quantity and quality of nominalization in academic writing.

Teaching theories provide important guidance for language teaching materials development, but there is little research on how textbook writers apply teaching theories in the actual writing process. This study analyzes the process of compiling iEnglish , a series of textbooks based on the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) and proposes an Integrated Model of Teaching Theory and Action Research for textbook writing. By elaborating the roles of teaching theory and action research at different stages of textbook writing and the interaction between theory and practice during the process, the study concludes that the Integrated Model can promote both textbook improvement and theory refinement.

Although research on teaching materials use has important implications for materials development, little literature examines how teachers actually use materials in the classroom. The present study, taking the theoretical framework for using and evaluating Production-Oriented Approach (POA) teaching materials (Wen, 2017), explores the procedure and the rationale of an experienced Chinese university EFL teacher’s use of POA teaching materials. Multiple methods were employed in data collection, including classroom observations, teacher interviews, the teacher’s lesson plans, and PowerPoints, as well as students’ written and oral products. Data analysis showed that the teacher followed a three-phase process of materials use. Before class, teaching objectives were set, materials were selected, adapted, and then transformed into teaching activities. During class, the teaching activities were implemented with the materials. After class, the effectiveness of using the materials was assessed. The study revealed that the teacher played an active role in practicing the essential POA principles of “productive-objectives-determined” and “input-in-service-to-output” in the entire process of material use.