The Influence Of Senior High School Students’ Genre Awareness On Their English Reading-Writing Integrated Test Performance

As more importance is being attached to understanding and producing English texts at a discourse level rather than at a word or a sentence level in the teaching of English in recent years,students’ English learning activities are expected to be based on discourse.Developing genre awareness,as a means of promoting students’ comprehension of the relationship between communicative purposes and textual features at every discourse level,is accordingly crucial.Despite fruitful research about the positive role of genre awareness in improving students’ English reading and writing,little attention has been drawn to the relationship between senior high school students’ genre awareness and their English reading-writing integrated test performance.The study is intended to answer the following three research questions:(1)What is the general level of genre awareness of senior high school students?(2)Are there any relationships between senior high school students’ genre awareness and their performance in the three types of English reading-writing integrated tests?(3)How do the four components of genre awareness influence the performance in the three types of English reading-writing integrated tests?The study took 50 students of Grade 2 from a senior high school in Quanzhou City,Fujian Province as the subjects.A summary test,a continuation test,and an essay-response test were conducted to collect subjects’ English reading-writing integrated test performance.Besides,a questionnaire survey on genre awareness was employed to analyze the general level of genre awareness of senior high school students.And then the collected data were analyzed by SPSS13.0.Through the data analysis,the study draws the following conclusions:(1)Senior high school students’ genre awareness is at a medium level.Of the four sub-components of genre awareness,the awareness of application is the highest whereas the awareness of textual conventions is the lowest.The awareness of communicative purposes ranks second followed by the awareness of context.(2)There is a positive correlation between genre awareness and the performance in reading-writing integrated tests.Of the three types of reading-writing integrated tests,the performance in the continuation test is highly correlated with genre awareness while the performance in the summary test and that in the essay-response test are moderately correlated with genre awareness.(3)As for summary test,the awareness of application has the highest correlation to the performance in this test whereas the correlation between the awareness of communicative purposes and the performance in the test was not observed.As for continuation test,every component of genre awareness has positive influence on the test performance.Among the four components,the awareness of textual conventions has the highest correlation to the test performance.As for essay-response test,every component of genre awareness has positive influence on the performance.The awareness of context has the highest correlation to the test performance.The awareness of communicative purposes has the lowest correlation to both performance in continuation test and that in essay-response test.The study provides valuable information about current situation of senior high school students’ genre awareness and has implications for teaching reading-writing integrated tests.