Exploring The Writing Teaching Of Two Chinese Senior High School EFL Teachers

English writing is an essential language skill and an important tool for personal thinking development and socialization,so instruction of English writing has been a research focus.However,the existing studies mainly focus on the beliefs and practices about writing instruction of college instructors,but give little attention to those of secondary English teachers.This study aimed to explore beliefs and practices about writing instruction of two English teachers in a Beijing senior high school.Taking a longitudinal qualitative case study approach.this study used snowball sampling and collected multiple sources of data.including classroom observations,semi-structured interviews with the teachers and their students.lesson plans,handouts and students’ writings.Thematic analyses were carried out after these data were repeatedly read and checked.Three major findings were emerged from data analysis.First,the two teachers believed that writing instruction must cultivate students’ critical thinking and improve their comprehensive language competence.They claimed that implementation of writing instruction should be compatibly integrated with the cultivation of basic language skills.Second,they followed the genre-based approach to teach writing across the school English curriculum.Different genres were focused in different grades,for example,in senior one,narration was taught as a priority.Accordingly,their assessment on students’ writings varied in focuses on language use,content and structure.During teaching,they provided students with diverse language opportunities(i.e.drama)for effective language input and output.Third,all the students interviewed spoke highly of the teachers’ writing instruction.They thought they understood different genres better and wrote more suitably for different audiences.More importantly,they thought it improved their comprehensive English competence.This study has two implications.First,it testified the feasibility of genre-based writing instruction in the EFL test-oriented context,providing new pattern for fellow English teachers.Second,it encourages future researches to explore the problems and solutions in teaching writing to help more teachers at different developmental stages.