Reflections on the Production-Oriented Approach vis-à-vis Pre-service Teachers

In today’s post-method climate, it is unlikely that any named approach or method will be adopted as a whole in a large variety of contexts. While the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) is no exception, it is based on sound principles, and the activities in iEnglish, a tangible implementation of POA, provide excellent models for pre-service teachers. I discuss here some of the challenges for pre-service ESL/EFL teachers, based on both my research and on my experience, and show how the principles of POA can help raise their awareness of certain crucial issues. This is not to claim that all pre-service teachers face the same difficulties, but rather, the ones described here are the most common in my experience. In Mackey, Polio, and McDonough (2004), we found that pre-service teachers did not provide oral feedback or a pre-emptive focus on language as often as experienced teachers when implementing the same set of lesson plans. We hypothesized that the preservice teachers were so focused on following the lesson plan that they did stop and think about how to draw students’ attention to language issues. In a related study (Polio, Gass, & Chapin, 2006), we found that when completing an information gap activity with ESL students, pre-serviceteachers focused on the best way to complete the task and the ESL students’ feelings, not on student learning, as did the experienced teachers. I see these findings as being related to Wen’s (2016) concern about reducing the teacher’s role to that of “facilitator, consultant, and helper” (p. 4). Although not all pre-service teachers see themselves as merely facilitators, it is important for pre-service teachers to see themselves as people who provide the tools and structured activities for learners as emphasized by the Learning-Centered Principle. In our two studies, the pre-service teachers did not seem to be able to provide feedback or to view a task as a language learning activity because they were too focused on the lesson or the learner and not on learning. Somewhat related to this issue is the lack of some pre-service teachers to move beyond a top-down approach to the chosen listening or reading material. Wen (2016) stated: I have found quite a few teachers like to assign students a speaking or writing activity preceded or followed by brain-storming. They may ask students to do pair or group work