A Study on the Practice of English Major Reading Instruction Based on the Production-Oriented Approach

Reading courses in college English major programs have been identified by the students themselves as one of the major components necessary to obtain language knowledge and acquire academic literacy. They serve as communication channels. Nevertheless, traditional reading teaching has predominantly been input and comprehension-based, thus the vast majority of reading activities have been only the effective reading practice rather than the full-fledged integration of reading with output. The present work is a study within the theoretical framework of the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) aimed at discovering the practical ways of a successful POA implementation into English major reading teaching.Teaching experiment lasting a semester was performed on two parallel sophomores classes in a Chinese university. The experiment involved the use of student output from activities such as academic summary writing, debate, and text rewriting at the pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading stages. Data were gathered through questionnaires, classroom observations, comparisons of pre- and post-tests, and student learning journals, and were analyzed from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.The results show that along with students reading comprehension skills and academic output abilities,POA also effectively impacted students’ critical thinking and classroom engagement. The results imply that the POA can act as a catalyst for a full learning cycle of “input–processing–output” among English majors, therefore shedding light on the college English reading instruction reform and offering some new ideas and practical references.