| From the late80s, genre theory has become the hot topic among the field oflinguistics, and scholars in Australia has began to apply genre theory to ESL(Englishas Second Language) writing class. Genre theory emphasizes on the social purposesthe writing should achieve and regards writing as “social actionâ€. And the genre-basedteaching pedagogy makes students become more aware of the different genres theywill encounter during writing, helping them construct content as well formal schematawhich will benefit their construction of a written discourse. However, the traditionalESL teaching in China pays too much attention on vocabulary and grammar, ignoringstudents’ ability on constructing discourse and their creativity in writing which affectsstudents’ ability to construct a discourse that can express certain social purpose.Based on genre theory, this research studies the influence of genre theory on highschool students’ writing ability. The author applies genre theory to high schoolEnglish writing course and proves the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy. Forsenior high-school students, genre-based pedagogy can help them improve their ESLwriting ability. And for teachers who use such pedagogy, their awareness on genreshave been raised and the “scaffolding†role has been enhanced.The author has come up with a teaching model to direct the empirical research.The teaching model is based on the teaching-learning cycle brought up by SFL Schooland the implications gained through teaching Chinese ESL students’ writing. Twointact classes have taken part in the research: one class has applied product approach;the other has applied genre approach. The class which has applied genre approach hadbeen divided into different groups (the high-level and the low-level groups). Thisdivision of different groups is based on the scores of pretest. Posttest has been carriedout to collect students writing scores, and the scores of the writing tests have been putinto the SPSS19.0to do the data analysis. The independent sample T-test has beenused to study which approach is more effective. The independent sample T-test hasalso been carried out to examine genre approach’s influence on students with differentwriting ability (High and Low level groups). Students’ texts in genre-based classroom have been examined from the aspects of content, organization, vocabulary andlanguage use and have been analyzed by using one-way ANOVA to make comparison.The results have shown that genre approach is more effective than productapproach in improving students writing ability. For students who are in theexperimental class, they have made significant progress in organization followed bycontent, vocabulary and language use. Genre approach is also more effective tostudents who are in high-level group than to students who are in low-level group.Finally, the author has made a conclusion to the implication of the genreapproach and has pointed out the practical value of the research. What’s more, theauthor emphasized that the genre approach can adapt to Chinese second languagewriting class. The author has also illustrated the shortcomings in the research design. |
