Balancing Authenticity and Learner Autonomy in Vocational Business English Education: A Production-Oriented Perspective

Vocational Business English education is expected to prepare learners for communication in professional settings while also developing their capacity to manage learning beyond the classroom. These two expectations bring authenticity and learner autonomy into close relationship, yet they can also create a pedagogical tension: highly authentic workplace tasks may demand a level of linguistic, strategic, and self-regulatory readiness that many vocational learners have not yet developed. This concept paper examines how authenticity and learner autonomy can be integrated through the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) in Chinese vocational Business English education. Drawing on established accounts of authenticity, learner autonomy, and POA, the paper argues that authenticity should not be treated as a simple increase in task realism, nor autonomy as a reduction of teacher involvement. Instead, the two need to be calibrated through staged task design, selective input, collaborative rehearsal, formative assessment, and gradual transfer of learning responsibility. A POA-informed framework is proposed across the motivating, enabling, and assessing phases. The discussion highlights learner readiness, cognitive load, assessment literacy, and teacher facilitation as key conditions for sustainable integration. The paper concludes that authentic vocational tasks are most autonomy-supportive when they are accompanied by structured scaffolding and repeated opportunities for learner decision-making, reflection, and revision.

Authenticity; Learner autonomy; Production-Oriented Approach; Vocational Business English; China

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