1. Shell terminology

Shell nouns are a type of conceptual abstract nouns used in academic English for discourse coherence and information advancement, with pre referential and anaphorical functions. They frequently appear in academic texts, but Chinese English learners often overlook their role in integrating concepts and advancing information in language production, resulting in a loss of complexity and coherence in language production. Despite the increasing importance of shell nouns in academic English teaching, there is currently a lack of effective teaching methods.

Reasons for using POA in shell noun teaching

POA is an innovative theory for foreign language teaching in China, aimed at solving the problem of separation of learning and application. Through the teaching philosophy of scenario driven output and input driven output, as well as the three teaching stages of driving, facilitating, and evaluating, POA aims to improve teaching efficiency. POA has been proven effective in academic English writing, especially in nominalization teaching. In the teaching of shell nouns, POA provides a teaching design framework to help teachers determine teaching objectives and methods. The complexity of academic discourse requires teachers to design precise input activities, and the input facilitation of POA emphasizes the integration of design and output tasks in input activities, helping students understand and apply them. The output driven assumption of POA stimulates students' interest in learning, which is consistent with context based output teaching. This study adopts action research method to explore the application of POA in the teaching of shell nouns, aiming to improve students' discourse logic ability and answer how to implement POA teaching and its effectiveness.

3 Research Design

The study was conducted among third year undergraduate students majoring in computer science in 985 universities, aiming to enhance their academic English proficiency. The student has a certain level of English proficiency and research experience. The teaching materials are based on a self built corpus of computer science papers, and 15 high-frequency shell nouns have been selected as teaching objectives. The teaching process follows the POA model, which includes three stages: driving, facilitating, and evaluating. The driving stage requires students to write summaries, and the facilitating stage organizes activities of different difficulty levels. The evaluation stage includes modification, peer evaluation, and presentation. By comparing expert samples with student texts, guide students to identify problems and stimulate their interest in learning.

4 Action Research

This study explores the application of Output Oriented Approach (POA) in teaching academic English shell nouns through two rounds of action research. In the first round of action research, teachers designed production exercises from words to sentences and then to discourse, including vocabulary exercises, sentence level exercises, and discourse level exercises, to promote students' mastery of shell nouns. In vocabulary practice, students deepen their understanding of high-frequency vocabulary through classification memory. The focus of exercises at the sentence level is on the discourse coherence function of shell nouns, such as premonition and anaphora. At the discourse level, exercises guide students to deepen their understanding and use of shell nouns through error correction activities and group collaboration.

5 Summary and Inspiration

In recent years, although there has been progress in academic English teaching in China, there has been insufficient attention paid to micro level classroom activities. The teaching of shell nouns faces challenges, and through two rounds of practice, the POA teaching method effectively improves the quality of student output. The teaching difficulty lies in the implementation of the principle of precision, including ensuring the accuracy of input materials and activities, as well as focusing on key and difficult points, guiding students to pay attention from the surface to the deep level. The research focuses on the application of POA in the teaching of shell name discourse function, and in the future, its application in position construction and interpersonal function teaching can be explored. The details of instructional design need improvement, such as promoting diversity in activities.