Effects of the Production-Oriented Approach on EFL Learners' Writing Performance in China's Tertiary Education

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.