The Genre-chunk Method Applied In The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High School

English writing is an advanced process of output in the language learning.New requirements have been proposed in Curriculum Standards for General High School(2017 version).Among the theory of the teaching of English writing,Martin(1992)’s genre-based approach based on the Systematic Functional Linguistics and Lewis(1993)’s lexical approach are mature and popular.They guide the English writing from two aspects: genre and language use.In order to design the teaching of English writing more effectively,the “steel rod”(genre)and “concrete”(chunks)were combined in this study for a new method: genre-chunk method.And its effect was verified by the teaching experiment,interview and other methods.The research questions addressed are:(1)What effect does the genre-chunk method have on the teaching of English writing in high school?(2)What effect does the genre-chunk method have on different levels of students?Guided by the genre-chunk method,ten writing lessons along with some complementary lessons were designed for the teaching experiment.Thirty-five students from Grade 10 in SY High School were selected as the subjects of the experiment.Jacobs et al.’s ESL composition profile was adopted in this research for the assessment the subjects’ compositions in the pre-test and post-test,and the scores were collected and statistically analyzed after the tests.In addition,the chunks in their compositions in the tests were analyzed and classified to conclude the effects of the genre-chunk method on the learning of chunks.Moreover,six subjects from different levels were selected and interviewed to obtain their viewpoints on the genre-chunk method.The major findings of this research are as follows.(1)The genre-chunk method is effective on the English writing in all the five dimensions proposed in Jacobs et al.’s ESL composition profile,especially in “Language Use”.(2)The effect of the genre-chunk method is different on the learning of different types of chunks.In term of the function of chunks,the genre-chunk method is effective on the learning of discourse chunks and stance chunks.As for the structure of chunks,this method is effective to help the students learn sentence patterns and single phrases.(3)The genre-chunk method is more effective to improve the English writing of the students in the middle and low levels.The middle-level students’ writing improved particularly in the “Content”and “Language Use” dimension,and the low-level students’ writing improved in the“Organization”,“Vocabulary” and “Language Use” dimension.