The Influence Of Genre-based Approach On Senior High Students’ Ability To Summarise The Main Idea

Genre-based teaching method has been paid more attention by many Chinese scholars and English teachers since it was introduced into China first by Qin Xiubai in the 1990 s.Genre-based teaching method is based on genre and genre analysis,the purpose of which is to help students master the structures,social purposes and social meanings of different genres.Besides,it can guide students to explore the process of discourse construction,thus enabling students to create new articles independently based on structure and language characteristics of the specific genre.Nowadays many English teachers in Senior High still teach English reading in the traditional way,focusing on the vocabulary,set phrases and grammar in the text,ignoring the text analysis,genre analysis and emotion analysis,which affects students’ interest in learning English.In order to change the situation,this paper applies the theory in English reading classes.Its purpose is to inspire students to deduce the structure and language characteristics by analyzing the text.By practicing using these characteristics repeatedly,students gradually can grasp the core of the text quickly and understand the intention or emotion the writer would like to express to readers.This paper,firstly,makes a statistical analysis on the genre types of the first 5 books of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.It shows that narration,exposition and argumentation make up the largest proportion,which means they are the most important genres students should master in Senior High.Secondly,according to the features and structures of the three genres,the author chooses typical texts from the teaching materials to design the teaching cases,in which the author performs the reading teaching experiment with the experiment object,the students of Class(7)Senior 1 in a Senior High School in Yichun by guiding students to draw mind maps to show the structures of each genre and applying them to summarize the main idea of each text.Finally,by comparing and analyzing the test result,the questionnaire result and the interview result,the paper tests the application effect of genre-based teaching method in improving the students’ ability to summarize the main idea of texts in senior high.It shows that genre-based teaching method used in English reading has a positive effect on improving students’ reading ability.Students become more sensitive to the genre of texts and more proficient in analyzing the structure and characteristics of the text.Genre-based teaching method helps to improve students’ ability to read quickly as well as summarize the main idea accurately.Thus,it is suggested that it be applied in English reading in Senior High.However,there is a need for English teachers to learn more theories of the teaching method to inspire their creativity,then leading their students to learn more independently.Only in this way can the genre approach work effectively in enhancing students’ reading ability.