| In Systemic Functional Linguistics, genre was defined as some kind of certain language contexts belonging to a language type. Here, the contexts can be recognized as texts,which have same social function and structure. As a writing teaching starting point, genre has been the focus. Through genre and genre knowledge, we can help students understand how to take part in concrete contexts in languages and complete effective communicative purposes. Genre refers to practical writing in this study, which is different from other genres for the reason that it focuses on writing context, writing purposes and readers. In terms of the importance of genre, this study intends to develop EFL learner?s genre awareness, and therefore to improve their writing competence.The thesis mainly studies the following three questions:1) What is the situation of EFL learners? writing and genre-awareness?2) Do Chinese EFL students improve their genre awareness after a genre-based writing course?3) Do Chinese EFL students improve their writing competence after a genre-based writing course?In order to improve students? genre awareness and writing competence, the study combine genre with writing tasks. During the ten-week writing courses, Chinese sophomore students who come from a college in Guangzhou(n=40) took part in carefully designed experiment of genre-based tasks. The author collected qualitative and quantitative data to examine students? changes: survey, interviews, and the email writing at the beginning and the end of the term respectively. The results revealed that the situations of students? writing are complicated and students have certain genre-awareness, however their genre-awareness is in low level. In addition, the students made progress in genre awareness and writing competence, including contents and language choices. The study suggested that we should focus on cultivating student?s genre-awareness in the foreign language teaching and improve students? writing competence through genre-awareness. |
