A Study On The Application Of Genre-based Teaching Approach To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The genre-based teaching approach is a kind of teaching method that teachers consciously use the genre and genre analysis to carry out teaching activities around the schema structure of the discourse in classroom teaching.Reading is a complicated process,which involves not only the processing of syntax,words,semantics and other linguistic information,but also the acquisition of textual knowledge,context and the use of reading strategies.The use of the genre-based teaching approach in English reading teaching is based on the analysis of the genre of the discourse,and the teaching activities are carried out as a communicative process.A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is used in this study,and a 16-week teaching experiment is conducted in a senior high school in Nanchang,Jiangxi Province,with 108 students in senior two from two parallel classes(the experimental class and the control class)selected as experimental subjects.The genre-based teaching approach is implemented in the experimental class for reading instruction while the traditional grammar-translation method is adopted in the control class for reading instruction.A pre-test and post-test comparison analysis is made to verify that students in the experimental class have higher reading ability than those in the control class after the experiment.Two questionnaire surveys are also given to 54 students in the experimental class before and after the experiment,aiming to investigate the changes of students’ genre awareness from three perspectives of linguistic features,text structure and social culture.Finally,in order to further corroborate the test results and questionnaire results,six students with different reading levels from the experimental class are interviewed about the effectiveness of the genre-based teaching approach and strategies for effective use of genre knowledge.The experimental results show that the genre-based teaching approach can cultivate students’ interest in reading,effectively improve their reading ability in analyzing the text structure,summarizing the main idea and inferring the writing intention,and enable them to master the communicative purpose and discourse structures of different genres and realize that a discourse is both a language construction and a social meaning construction.On the other hand,the use of the genre-based teaching approach in reading teaching can promote the cultivation of students’ genre awareness,and students can deeply explore the unique connotation of the reading text by mastering the linguistic features,text structure and social culture of different discourses.Compared with the traditional grammar-translation method,the genrebased teaching approach places more emphasis on guiding students to explore the overall structure of the discourse,helping them to understand the content and thematic connotation of the discourse from a macro perspective,and improving their reading comprehension and comprehensive language use skills.