A Study Of The Application Of Process Genre Approach To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

As is known to all,English writing ability is a core skill that is always stressed by foreign language teaching in China.Writing is a significant criterion to measure students' integrated capacity of using English.Meanwhile,if students acquire it,their English ability will be improved a lot from many aspects,such as vocabulary,syntax,logical thinking and organization through writing process.However,when facing writing,most students have two major difficulties.One is absence of methods,which means they don't know how to analyze;the other is insufficient content,that is to say,students have no idea what semantic components should be involved.On the other hand,in terms of writing teaching,there are also some problems.For example,writing class prefers to pay more attention to the teacher,language and result rather than the student,content and process.Besides,most English teachers advocate the traditional method which is not only time-consuming and laborious but also produces little effect.So students' writing performance is still some distance from being satisfactory.In view of the above mentioned situation,in order to explore an effective way to solve those problems through practice,this paper aims at availing the process genre approach to teach English writing at senior high school.This teaching model strategically integrates the advantages of some main traditional teaching methods.This study is based on genre analysis theory to solve the following two questions:(1)How does the process genre approach affect students' discourse analysis ability?(2)How does the process genre approach improve students' practical writing achievement?This paper consists of six chapters which include introduction,four chapters of text and conclusion.Chapter One is the introduction which states the current situation of English writing teaching in China,research questions,research methods,significance of the thesis and structure of the thesis.With the revision and improvement of Curriculum Standards,English writing keeps pace with the times.Therefore,educators are working hard to improve students' English writing standard.However,traditional teaching methods place more emphasis on mechanical repetitive memory and practice,stress writing results but neglect process,even ignore the inputs to genre graphic of text.For students,passive absorption is not an effective way to improve writing level.Chapter Two is the literature review which briefly summarizes some main methods in English writing teaching theory at home and abroad: the product approach;the process approach;and the genre approach.Then it introduces a comprehensive mode of English writing teaching including its development,superiority and application at home and abroad which is called process genre approach proposed by R.Badger & G.White in 2000.And it also points out some limitations of the previous study.Chapter Three introduces genre and genre analysis theory which discusses the process genre approach to carry on the language communication activity under the prescriptive situation.It also carries on the genre and the structure analysis to guide students to understand features of different genres.Furthermore,it helps students master discourse features and writing skills of different genres to improve students' English writing ability.Chapter Four is the research design which consists of research hypotheses,research subjects,research instruments and research procedures.In this experiment,the author chooses two Grade one parallel classes from a senior high school.One class is selected randomly as the experimental class which adopts process genre approach in writing class.The other is controlled class taught by the traditional method.Before the experiment,the two classes that are all tested to prove English writing ability of them is approximately at the same level.After the experiment,in order to prove whether the process genre approach can effectively advance students' writing competence,the two classes are tested again.Meanwhile,questionnaire and interview are conducted in the experimental class before and after experiment,which shows that students' cognition and writing level have changed obviously.Chapter Five statistics and analyzes the experimental data.After experiment,the author compares and analyzes test results,questionnaires results and feedback from five random interviews.These data indicate that writing performance is at the same level in the two classes before experiment.However,the progress of the EC is more obvious after experiment which proves that process genre approach is effective in prompting students' writing level.The last chapter is conclusion.This research turns out that process genre approach can effectively improve students' English writing skills,discourse analysis,English practical writing competence and cooperative spirit.Frankly speaking,due to some subjective and objective factors,the author finds some limitations in this research and proposes several suggestions for further studies.