Different Effects Of "Product Approach","Process Approach" And "Process-Genre Approach" On Students Of Different Writing Abilities

The New Curriculum Standards for Senior High School (experimental) publishedin the year of2003by the Ministry of Education emphasized that: teachers need tofocus on the cultivation of students’ application of practical language skills in theteaching procedure. Since the Curriculum being a turning point in the English teachingfields, educationists and teachers started to reevaluate the current English writingmethodologies, and tried to analysis the reasons why English writing was so difficultfor teachers to teach and students to learn.The purpose of the current study is to investigate the correlations between threeteaching approaches and writing proficiencies. Therefore, the research questionsaddressed in the present study are as follows:1. What effects does the “Product Approach” have on senior high school students withdifferent levels?2. What effects does the “Process Approach” have on senior high school students withdifferent levels?3. What effects does the “Process-Genre Approach” have on senior high schoolstudents with different levels?Subjects of this study were three classes of the second grade from Yu Cai seniorhigh school in Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province. We called them Class A, Class B andClass C for short. Each class has60students (20students were categorized as highwriting ability,20as middle writing ability and20as low writing ability),180studentsin total. The “Product Approach” was applied for Class A, the “Process Approach” forClass B and the “Process-Genre Approach” for Class C. Before the experimentactually began, all the students attended a writing test chosen from College entranceexamination, which was served as a pretest, and a posttest was given at an interval ofabout18weeks to reveal the change as exactly as possibly. Through the comparison ofthe results of pretest and posttest, the study tried to find out the best approach whichcan enhance students’ writing levels to a large degree. The results of the study uncovered the following tendencies:1. The “Product Approach” is more effective to the subjects with low writing abilitythan to subjects with high and middle ability.2. The “Process Approach” is more effective to the subjects with high writing abilitythan to subjects with low and middle ability.3. The “Process-Genre Approach” is more effective to the subjects with middlewriting ability than to subjects with high and low ability.Through examining the interaction between teaching method and writing ability,the present study gave the evidence that there was no strength or weakness in teachingmethod itself, and the application of a specific method or techniques in languageteaching should take into account the individual characteristic of the targeted students,only by which could the potentiality of teaching method be explored to the greatestextent and thus can the teaching results be improved effectively.