Abstract
In this paper, we develop a general framework to study meson photoproduction off nucleons in the chiral quark model. The s- and u-channel resonance contributions are expressed in terms of the Chew-Goldberger-Low-Nambu (CGLN) amplitudes. The kaon-photoproduction processes, γp→K+Λ, γp→K+Σ0, and γp→K0Σ+, are calculated. The initial results show that the quark model provides a much improved description of the reaction mechanism for kaon photoproduction off the nucleon with less parameters than the traditional phenomenological approaches.