This paper presents the teaching practice of an Advanced English course for English majors within the framework of POA (Production-Oriented Approach), focusing on the various activities in the enabling stage involving mind mapping. The POA teaching procedure, as a holistic loop involving teaching, learning and evaluation, consists of "motivating, enabling, and assessment" phases. In the enabling stage of this study, mind-mapping is used as a supporting device to help students get the structure for their "production" task. For instance, keywords can be written on the mind map branches as a reminder for an oral task, and complete sentences can be produced on the basis of the key words in the mind map. Then with plenty of enabling activities, students get the language and ideas for their tasks. Eventually the structure, the language and the ideas together assist students with their "productions". Preliminary evaluation of the research design received positive feedback, evidence primarily in the form of task samples and learner interviews on the pros and cons of this particular teaching methodology. The meaning of this research rests with its attempt to contextualize a new theoretical framework, a classroom practice guided in a principled way, which, in turn, might generate a variety of insights and interpretations from various aspects.

This study compares the frequency, collocation and semantic prosody of situation, environment and circumstance in Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL). Vocabulary is the cornerstone of second language learning and its development is one of the hot topics in second language acquisition researches. Huge in size, subtle in semantic difference and often presented in minimal contexts, synonyms in English remain a permanent challenge for Chinese English learners. Traditional synonym differentiation usually relies on item-by-item analysis of lexical meanings and introspective qualitative methods like intuition, experience, etc. However, in practice, such guesswork is far from satisfactory. With the rapid development of information technology, corpus linguistics provides a key to the study of synonyms. Based on corpus data, this paper compares and analyzes the selected synonyms using Antconc, Chi-square Calculator and BFSU Collocator. Findings indicate: 1) In terms of use frequency, Chinese students tend to overuse synonyms compared with native speakers; 2) In terms of salient collocations, Chinese students use the synonyms with lots of semantic ambiguity but few collocation types; 3) In terms of semantic prosody, on the Chinese students' side, inadequate accuracy is comparatively conspicuous as well as semantic prosody misuse. Preliminary cause analysis points to two main factors influencing Chinese students' mastery of synonyms, respectively L1 negative transfer and the misleading effect of Chinese-English dictionaries. Based on the above analysis, this paper puts forward some suggestions for teaching synonyms and compiling dictionaries.