The Application Of Genre-based Teaching Approach To The English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

Writing is an important communicative skill and plays a significant role in students’ tests and future career.However,writing has not been paid enough attention in reality,especially in in junior middle school.In most students’ writings,there are many problems such as vocabulary indigence,inadequacy in using complex structures,discourse without coherence.In order to solve these problems,this thesis tries to apply Genre-Based Teaching Approach(GBTA)in the junior high school.This method applies the genre and genre analysis theory to the real teaching to instruct the students the knowledge of genre,structure feature of the genre and language style so that their writing ability will be developed.The present study attempts to address the following research questions:(1)How does GBTA improve junior high school students’ writing in terms of vocabulary richness,syntactic complexity and discourse coherence?(2)How does GBTA improve writing ability of junior high school students with different English levels?(3)After applying GBTA,what changes have occurred to the students’ writing habits?In order to solve above mentioned problems,I chose 82 junior high school students of Grade nine at an educational institution in Nanjing as subjects and divided them into two classes.I taught the students of the experimental class with the GBTA while the students of the control class with the traditional method.The students of both classes were taught with the same content(argumentation,narration,practical writing)Then pretest and post tests were carried out before and after teaching.Both of the tests were chosen from the senior high school entrance examination of Nanjing in 2018 and 2019.Therefore,they were the typical writing tasks.Besides,the students were given a questionnaire before and after the test to check whether the GBTA could have a positive effect on the students’ writing habits.Besides,I chose 6 students randomly from the high,middle and low score groups and gave them an interview to understand their attitude and opinions on the GBTA.SPSS software was applied to analyze the vocabulary richness,syntactic complexity and discourse coherence of both classes.At the same time the matched samples of the experimental class at different level were carried out with the T test and variance analysis.The results of this research show: First,the GBTA could improve students’ vocabulary richness,syntactic complexity and discourse coherence in English writing;Second,the GBTA could improve the writing ability of students with different level;The students with high score level say in the interview that the GBTA can help them to improve the awareness of genre and reader;The students with middle score level say in the interview that the GBTA can help them to develop the awareness of editing so that their writing habits have been improved;The students with low score level say in the interview that the GBTA can help them to decrease the anxiety in writing and increase their interest and ability in writing;Third,the questionnaires of the pretest and post-test show that there is a positive change in students’ writing attitude and interest,writing obstacles,writing method.Therefore,the GBTA could develop the students’ writing habits by increasing their awareness of genre,editing and reader.The main implications of this thesis are: first,the GBTA could be combined with the senior high school entrance examination.Because the typical writing task of the exam is the practical writing,so the teacher could give the students more writing training of this genre in daily teaching period.Second,the teacher should adjust the teaching steps according to the students’ levels.There are some limitations in the thesis.The researching time is too short.The number of the genres is too few.Therefore,it should be further researched in the future.Third,the writing cannot just rely on the class.The student should read more qualified essays and practice more to improve their writing level gradually.The limitation and future suggestions of this research are: Because of limitation of time,the quantity of genre of this thesis is not enough.Therefore,we can do more researches on other genres;The quantity of subjects is also not enough and not representative.We can increase the number of subjects in the future researches;Besides,this research mainly focusses on the writing.We can carry out more researches on writing or reading.