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

Writing is an indispensable and comparably difficult part in English learning. It can reflect learner's English level to a large extent, as writing is the use of learners' integrated English skills. On the other hand, with the speeding up of globalization, exchanges and cooperation frequently take place among countries. As an international communication tool, the importance of English becomes more and more remarkable. There is no doubt that English writing is of high practical value.According to the National Curriculum Standards for Senior High School ELT issued by Chinese Ministry of Education, it is made clear that high school English teaching should cultivate and develop students' comprehensive language ability. The requirement of new standard for writing is that students are able to write letters, reports, abstracts, application form, resume, essays, business letter etc. Thus, it is necessary that the writing teaching should be concerned more with the use for special purpose and the genre of writing material.However, at present, there exist some problems in writing teaching in senior high school. According to the interview with the teachers and the questionnaires conducted to the students, writing teaching has not gained enough attention. Writing teaching pedagogy is out-of-date. And students haven't developed good writing habits. What's worse, they seldom edit and reflect on their compositions.To solve the existing problems, a number of teachers and researchers have devoted to the study of English writing teaching over the past several decades. There appear many methods of teaching, such as product approach, process approach and genre approach. But each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages in the process of teaching. In order to find a suitable approach, Badger and White(2000) integrated the above three approaches and come up with the process-genre approach to English writing teaching. The process-genre approach is a comprehensive method and stresses the students' writing ability of applying the grammatical structures to realize the communicative purpose.The author is planning to adopt the process-genre approach to the writing teaching in a normal senior high school. To test the effectiveness of process-genre approach, an experiment is carried out in two grade-two classes for one semester. One class is to apply the process-genre approach to teach writing and the other still adopts the traditional method of teaching. During the experiment, the author provides adequate model materials of the given genre for students to analyze the structure, characteristics, pragmatic and summarize useful sentences as well. The first step of writing is to imitate a composition in group. Then, the students begin to write their first draft individually, after which they receive the feedback from his or her teammates and the teacher. At the beginning and the end of the experiment, the quantitative and qualitative analysis containing a pre-test, a post-test, interview and two questionnaires were carried out and the data analysis was conducted and compared. The aim of the experiment is to verify the two hypotheses as follows:1. Students' interest in writing could be aroused so as to develop good writing habits with the guidance of process-genre approach.2. Students' writing ability could be improved by the use of process-genre approach in English writing.After the experiment, the author finds that not only the students, but also the teacher herself has benefited a lot from the implementation of the process-genre approach. The new writing teaching mode has made the author released from the dull monologue lecturer in the class and the correction of piles of compositions containing numerous mistakes. The students begin to think independently and dominate the class. They can identify the genre based on the writing requirement and arrange the structure. And the group activities have run throughout the whole writing process, from analyzing the input materials, imitating writing to assessing the composition. The awareness of cooperation has been strengthened.As for the raised hypothesis, on the basis of the experiment results, there is a significant difference between two classes after the experiment. The students of experimental class performed better than the students of controlled class. The mean of post-test scores for EC(9.8333) are higher than those of CC(7.6216). Besides, the mean of scores for EC have risen from 7.6111 in pre-test to 9.8333 in post-test. Therefore, after the application of the process-genre approach, the students in EC have made more progress in writing and their writing ability has been improved more than that of CC. In addition, analysis of the results from the questionnaire shows that students of EC have become interested and confident in English writing. Moreover, most of the students in experimental class have developed good habits of writing, including reading model essay and collecting related material, clear handwriting, making outline, using transitional words and useful sentences and writing first draft, revising draft and final draft. Besides, the application of the process-genre approach can not only help students develop good habits towards edit and correction of the composition, but also encourage them to revise because the approval from group members and teacher gives students the sense of achievement.In conclusion, it shows that the process-genre approach can arouse student' interest, develop good writing habits and improve their writing ability. Therefore, it should be implemented in senior high school English writing teaching.