The Production-Oriented Approach

This chapter deals with the background of current English instruction against which production-oriented approach (POA) has been developed, followed by a detailed explanation of the programme including its principles, hypotheses, and teacher-mediated instruction procedure. The teaching principles, serving as guidelines for the other two components, contain learning-centred principle (LCP), learning-using integration principle (LUIP) and whole-person education principle (WPEP). POA proposes three phases of English teaching, motivating, enabling, and assessing, accompanied at each phase by the teacher's mediation. In general, current university English instruction can be classified into two types, input-centred instruction (ICI) and output-centred instruction (OCI), with the former being more popular. ICI also called text-centred instruction, means that English teachers treat the text as an end rather than a means. OCI has been adopted generally along with the teacher's strong belief in the learner-centred principle. The chapter also presents an illustrative example of POA in use by a teacher from a Chinese university in Beijing.