A Study On Genre-based Pedagogy To The Integrated Reading And Writing Teaching Of English Exposition

Exposition is one of the genres that people frequently use in written communication.It has explicit communicative purpose,clear discourse structure and obvious linguistic features.Whether or not English learners can accurately understand and produce expository discourse is one of effective means to measure their language proficiency.Traditional teaching method focuses more on the language points of discourse but ignores its social context and meaning construction process.As a result,students cannot accurately understand the author’s writing intention.Besides,they find it difficult to produce a proper discourse that is consistent with communicative purpose.Starting from the purpose of communication,genre-based pedagogy considers discourse is not only a simple language phenomenon,but also a social meaning construction.It pays more attention to the dynamic constructive process of discourse and actively engages students in this process.In order to explore the teaching effects of genre-based pedagogy,this study took English exposition as example to conduct an 11-week integrated reading and writing teaching experiment,that is,students wrote on the basis of reading.The experimental participants were from two natural classes of English major in the second grade of a technical college in Jiangxi,one for the experimental class and the other for the control class,40 students in each class.The teacher applied genre-based pedagogy to the experimental class.And traditional teaching method was conducted in the control class.Research instruments included pre-test,post-test,and interview.Both pre-test and post-test covered reading and writing tests.The writing test scores were given by two teachers from the aspects of content,organization,language use,and fluency,and the final score was calculated by their average.The results of the reading and writing tests were analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The research results show that the means of reading and writing tests of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class.Compared with traditional teaching method,genre-based pedagogy is more conducive to improving students’ reading and writing ability on English exposition.The interview results also indicate that genre-based pedagogy has been welcomed and supported by most of students.This can be explained that genre-based pedagogy combinescommunicative purpose and the language features specific to the genre,which leads students to understand the discourse more accurately and quickly.And it guides students to complete the structure and meaning construction of discourse based on reading,so they have a better writing performance,compared with traditional writing-only teaching method.The enlightenment brought by this research is that during teaching process,in order to improve students’ English reading and writing ability,teacher should combine reading and writing instead of dividing them up.Preceding reading has a positive effect on subsequent students’ writing performance.In addition,teacher should take the communicative purposes as starting point to cultivate students’ genre awareness and to help students learn about genre features through appropriate reading and writing training.