Effects Of Genre-based Pedagogy On Oral Performance Of Description Of Senior High School Students

Nowadays,how to improve students’ oral communicative ability has become a major difficulty in English teaching.The genre-based pedagogy emphasizes the language acquisition in context and the communicative purpose.The author tries to apply the genre-based pedagogy into oral English teaching,guiding learners to analyze the discourse structure and linguistic feature of different genres so as to better achieve the communicative purpose.This study is devoted to explore effects of genre-based pedagogy on high school students’ oral performance in description in terms of pronunciation and fluency,content,descriptive discourse structure and language use as well as effects on students’ oral performance in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency.The experimental participants were two natural classes of grade 10 of a high school in Jiangxi province,one for the experimental group(EG)and the other for the control group(CG),30 students in each class.The teacher applied genre-based pedagogy approach to the experimental class for 14 weeks,and the four steps of genre-based pedagogy proposed by Brisk(2015)were adopted,including: 1)the deconstruction of text;2)joint or individual construction of the graphic organizer/conferencing;3)joint construction of text;4)group or individual construction.The traditional 3P approach(presentation,practice and production)was conducted in the control class.Research instruments included oral pre-test and oral post test.Firstly,an overall score was given by two teachers and detailed score was given from four aspects,including pronunciation and fluency,content,descriptive discourse structure and language use.Besides,tools like Praat,Antwordprofiler,Syllable Counter,and Web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer were used to analyze students’ oral performance in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency.All the results were analyzed by SPSS21.0.The results show that: 1)there is significant difference between the EG and CG in the post oral test(P=.04<.05).The average score of students’ oral performance in the EG is higher than that in the CG;2)after 14 weeks experiment,the average score of EG is higher than that of the CG in terms of pronunciation and fluency,content and discourse structure(P=.027<.05;P=.011<.05;P=.006<.05);3)EG outperformed CG in the post test in terms of the speaking rate of fluency(P=.007<.05).The above experimental results show that,compared with the traditional 3P approach,genre-based pedagogy can improve students’ oral proficiency more efficiently,which includes improvements in fluency,content,as well as discourse structure in description.The implications of this study for language teaching and learning can be summarized in the following points.First of all,teachers should pay more attention to communicative purpose in oral English teaching,and consciously cultivate students’ genre awareness so as to help students master communicative meaning of different genres.Besides,genre-based pedagogy is helpful to improve students’ fluency of oral English in description and can be applied in other genres as well.