Genre-based College English Teaching Of Reading Research

In the study of foreign language, reading ability plays an important role in improving comprehensive language skills; meanwhile, reading instruction occupies a crucial position in college English instruction. But, in China, the college English reading instruction is mainly following the grammar-translation method and the teacher-centered, examination-oriented English teaching pattern that focuses on solving the problems of vocabulary and grammar prevents students from developing their reading ability.In the mid-1980s, Genre-based teaching approach came out, and it's a pedagogy based on genre and genre analysis. It has provided a new perspective for English reading instruction. Genre-based teaching approach applies the concept of genre and genre analysis to the classroom, aiming to let the students know the social function and communicative purposes of a certain genre, and a repertoire of genre knowledge including schematic structure of texts as well as their language and version features. Once students can master the generic conventions under certain social and cultural contexts, they can enhance their reading ability basically.In order to get rid of the shortages of traditional reading instruction and improve the quality of English reading instruction in our country, this thesis intends to apply genre-based teaching approach to college English reading instruction and uses teaching experiment to testify the effectiveness of genre-based teaching approach in reading instruction.During the teaching experiment, the author comes up with two hypothesizes: one is that genre-based teaching approach will improve students'reading ability; the second one is that genre-base teaching approach will enhance students'autonomous learning ability. To testify these experimental hypothesizes, according to the reality of students' situation, the author puts forward a kind of reading instruction pattern--"before reading-while reading-after reading", which is genre-based. Teaching experiment is carried out among 80 sophomores of Hei Longjiang University, who are non-English majors for one term, and the author adopts quantitative and qualitative methods in the teaching experiment, including reading comprehension tests to experimental class and comparing class before and after the teaching experiment, questionnaires, individual interviews and classroom observation only to the experimental class. After the teaching experiment, the author analyses the data collected from the experiment. From the data analysis, we can conclude that the students in the experimental class develop a relatively better understanding of texts, thus, it indicates that genre-based teaching approach can enhance students'reading ability and autonomous learning ability, which testifies the experiment hypothesizes successfully.In China, Genre-based teaching approach in reading instruction is still at a relatively early stage, and there are still some problems in using it. A lot of work should be done in order to modify such a teaching approach to our classroom. Owing to the limitations of the author's academic knowledge and limited conditions, this study is only a tentative one, leaving too much room to improve. At last, the author hopes this study would be helpful for college English reading instruction and enlighten more and more teachers to work on this field.