Applying the Production-Oriented Approach to Hotel English Speaking Instruction in a Vocational College Context: An Empirical Study

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jhve.202616302

Author(s)

Yijin Wan

Affiliation(s)

Department of Economic Management, Guizhou Aerospace Vocational and Technical College, Zunyi, Guizhou, China

Abstract

This study addresses three persistent challenges in vocational college Hotel English speaking instruction: low student initiative, learning-application disconnection, and lack of authentic task design. It evaluates the effectiveness of the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) — a Chinese indigenous theory — through a 14-week quasi-experiment with 96 first-year hotel management students. The experimental group followed POA’s three-stage “Motivating – Enabling – Assessing” procedure using hotel-specific tasks (e.g., front desk, housekeeping, complaint handling), while the control group received conventional instruction. Data included pre/post oral assessments (CET-SET rubric), the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), and interviews. Results showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in oral fluency, accuracy, and task completion quality, and reported markedly lower speaking anxiety. The findings suggest POA effectively transforms inert knowledge into productive communicative competence in vocational ESP contexts, offering practical implications for Hotel English curriculum design.

Keywords

Production-Oriented Approach (POA); Hotel English Speaking; Vocational College English Teaching; Learning-Application Integration; Speaking Anxiety

References

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