The Application Of The Process Genre Approach To English Letter Writing Teaching In Junior High School

English writing is one of the four skills that must be mastered in English learning.Although English writing is full of challenges,it is the best way to examine the use of comprehensive English skills.However,current English writing teaching only focuses on the vocabulary and grammar of students,ignoring the cultivation of students’ thinking ability.Moreover,the current concepts and methods of English writing are outdated and cannot meet the needs of English teaching reform.Many foreign experts and scholars have used and tried various approaches for the improvement of English writing,such as the product approach,the process approach and the genre approach.Badger and White proposed the process genre approach.The teaching approach follows that writing is a communication with readers under certain social contexts,and pays attention to the writing process and meets the requirements of the new curriculum standards for writing.On the basis of combing the relevant theories of English writing teaching,this paper explored the teaching philosophy and frontier dynamics of English writing,and applied the process genre approach to English letter writing teaching in junior high school through a teaching experiment.The study designed a four-month experiment of process genre approach.The teaching content was letter writing.The teaching objects were 80 students in junior high school in Lin’an District of Hangzhou.The two classes were taught with different teaching approaches.The teacher in the control class used the product approach and displayed several invitation letters and analyzed the patterns of the invitation letters.Then the teacher asked the students to recite language materials and write a letter according to the given pattern.The experimental class was taught with the processgenre approach.First,introduced the topic and read some invitation letters;analyzed the invitation letters from three aspects,which were structure,content and language,and summarized the structure of invitation letter into four moves;provided some useful expressions and let students imitate analyzing invitation letter according to four moves;asked students to write an invitation letter by themselves;teachers and peers evaluated and modified the letter.The results of the experiment showed that the process genre approach could improve the English letter writing levels of students,especially in the organization and content of the article.Second,students’ genre awareness and enthusiasm for writing had increased.The experiment also proved that the process genre approach was helpful to students with different levels,especially low-levels students.