The practical landscape of teacher roles in college English classrooms based on the production-oriented approach: a review of empirical studies

Abstract

As an indigenized foreign language teaching theory in China, the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) explicitly identifies "teacher-led" instruction as one of its four core features. Although the POA theory provides a clear conceptual positioning of teacher roles, how these roles are actually enacted in practice remains insufficiently synthesized. This study employs a systematic review method to comprehensively retrieve and integrate empirical studies on teacher roles in POA-based college English classrooms published between 2015 and 2025. The review organizes existing evidence around three central questions: role enactment, implementation challenges, and influencing factors. The findings reveal that teachers play complex and multifaceted roles across the three teaching phases—motivating, enabling, and assessing—yet considerable individual differences exist in implementation quality. Additionally, teachers encounter challenges along cognitive, practical, and affective dimensions during role performance. Furthermore, multiple interacting factors at teacher, student, and contextual levels jointly shape teachers' role performance. This study argues that there is a notable gap between the theoretical prescriptions of POA teacher roles and empirical realities in practice. These findings offer implications for designing POA teacher training programs and providing institutional support, thereby facilitating more effective and large-scale implementation of the POA framework.