Exploring The Narrative Writing Teaching:A Case Study Of A Chinese EFL University Teacher

Narrative writing is one of the important genres and commonly regarded as the first step of learning to write.The majority of English as a foreign language(EFL)students has encountered a lot of problems in learning to write English narratives,and there is less systematic narrative writing instruction in the classroom.In recent years,the existing studies have mainly focused on the writing instruction of other genres,like expository writing,augmentative writing,academic writing,but paid little attention to narrative writing instruction.The present study aimed to investigate the teaching processes of narrative writing for Chinese university EFL students and the influence of the instruction on their learning of writing English narratives.Taking a longitudinal qualitative case study approach,this study selected one Chinese EFL university teacher as the key participant and five participating students.Multiple sources of data were collected,including classroom observations,semi-structured interviews with the instructor and students,questionnaires,handouts and written drafts.Three major findings emerged from the data analysis.First,the instructor followed the process-oriented approaches to teach narrative writing for Chinese EFL university students,involving a recursive procedure of prewriting,multi-drafting,evaluating,and revising.Second,the instructor taught the narrative writing in a covert teacher-centered way but she also valued the role of students in their learning to write narratives.She made full use of the group or pair discussions in class to transform students to become independent and collaborative writers.Third,all the participating students made achievement from the narrative writing instruction over one semester,such as in the writing habits and beliefs,audience awareness,rhetorical organizationThis study has two implications.First,it suggests that the influence of other writing instruction approaches(e.g.,genre-based approaches)on students’ learning of narrative writing can be investigated in the future research.Second,it encourages researchers to conduct comparative study on the impact of different approaches on students’ learning of narrative writing.