The Effect Of Application Of Genre-based Pedagogy To The Teaching Of Senior High School English Writing

Writing is a language skill essential to foreign language learners,and writing teaching is also the key content of English teaching in senior high school in our country.In view of the core competency in National English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2020)(Standards for short),the teaching of senior high school English writing is not as effective as expected in enhancing students’ writing ability,language ability and thinking quality.How to conduct effective English writing teaching and explore new English writing teaching models has long been a controversial issue for domestic practitioners and scholars.In this study,the author tries to apply genre-based pedagogy to the teaching of senior high school English writing,hoping to enhance students’ English writing ability and develop their genre awareness.This research is an applied research based on genre-based pedagogy guided by the theories of genre analysis and constructivism,with an aim to answer the following research questions:(1)To what extent can the use of genre-based pedagogy enhance students’ writing ability?(2)To what extent can the use of genre-based pedagogy improve students’ genre awareness?Based on previous studies,this study strives to construct a genre-based teaching model suitable for the teaching of senior high school English writing.The model is divided into five steps:(1)Determining the context: This stage focuses on determining the communicative purpose and situational context of the text(namely,field,tenor and mode).(2)Text analysis: This is the stage of genre analysis of the text.The text is analyzed to reveal the genre structure,linguistic characteristics,social purpose and cultural connotation of the text.(3)Joint construction: This stage is a group cooperative writing with the help of the teacher.According to the previous text analysis,students collaborate to create a text of a similar genre.(4)Individual construction: The students are asked to write a text independently based on the given topic.(5)Evaluation and promotion: This stage is for students to evaluate and modify their own texts in the form of self-evaluation and peer evaluation according to writing assessment standards.After that,teachers guide students to improve their works according to the purpose of writing.Due to the limited time,the author only selects practical writing such as letters as the main genre of writing teaching.The participants of this study are students from two ordinary classes in the first grade of a senior high school in Chongqing.Among them,the experimental class employed the constructed genre teaching method for writing teaching,and the control class used the traditional writing teaching method.Before the teaching,the pre-writing test was assigned in the two classes,and a survey on the English writing situation of the students was issued in the experimental class.After the two-month teaching comparison experiment,the post-writing test was conducted in the two classes.Meanwhile,the students in the experimental class were surveyed with the same questionnaire and six students in the experimental class were interviewed.The pre-texts and post-texts from the experimental class were analyzed and compared.SPSS 25.0 was used to analyze and compare the collected data of two questionnaires and the test scores of the two classes statistically.After the experiment,the test scores before and after the experiment were examined,which shows that the writing score of the experimental class was significantly higher than that of the control class.This indicates that the application of genre-based pedagogy can effectively enhance students’ writing ability.The results of surveys and interview with students in the experimental class show that the genre-based pedagogy can help students understand the structure of the text and strengthen their genre awareness.The author offers some suggestions on the application of genre-based pedagogy to English writing teaching based on the practice in the experiment,in order to promote the use of genre-based pedagogy in the teaching of senior high school English writing and provide some references for the follow-up research as well.