Effects Of The Genre-based Pedagogy On The Performance Of Senior High School Students In Continuation Task

In the English paper of the new college entrance examination started in 2021,the weight of writing task will be increased from about 21% to around 27%,and a new type of writing task,i.e.,the continuation task,will be adopted in several provinces.This new type of task provides an unfinished story and requires students to continue it according to thje given content.Due to its increased demands on students writing ability,making both students and teachers feel anxious in face of the continuation task.Although various teaching strategies have been tried,many problems such as awkward plots,monotonous language and inconsistency with the story line are easy to be found in students’ compositions,which traditional writing instruction models fail to resolve.In recent years,the value of genre-based pedagogy in writing instruction has gathered wide acknowledgement.The genre theory underscores the achievement of communicative purpose through a certain genre via the employment of corresponding lexical-grammar resource.Informed by the genre theory,the genre-based pedagogy has been found to be an effective teaching method in writing teaching,which emphasizes the use of the“Teaching-and-Learning Cycle”,and through the steps such as deconstruction,co-construction and independent construction,it provides students with content and language scaffolding,boosts students’ genre-awareness,alleviates their anxiety,and improves their writing performance consequently.However,the studies on the application of the genre-based teaching method to the continuation task are relatively insufficient.Genre-based pedagogy highlights the employment of certain language resource in order to reach corresponding communicative purpose.And when students working on a continuation task,they on one hand need to analyze the story’s intention so as to conceive logically coherent plots,on the other have to appreciate the given text’s lexical and grammatical features in order to utilize similar features in their composition to serve the genre and the topic.In light of the research gap and theoretical feasibility mentioned above,this study adjusted the genre-based pedagogy to meet the requirements of the continuation task,and tried to develop a writing instruction model to improve students’ writing performance in this new type of task.In order to test the effect of this teaching model,a pedagogical experiment was conducted and the qualitative and quantitative data collected and analyzed to explore the following three questions:(1)What is the influence of genre-based pedagogy on high school students’ vocabulary richness in the continuation task?(2)What is the influence of genre-based pedagogy on high school students’ syntactic complexity in the continuation task?(3)What is the influence of genre-based pedagogy on high school students’ cohesion and coherence performance in the continuation task?In this study,86 students from two parallel Senior 1 classes of a four-star high school in Nanjing City were recruited as research participants.The experimental class and control class contain 43 students respectively.Before the teaching experiment,pre-test was conducted to make sure that there was no significant difference in writing ability between these two classes.Through the vertical comparison of lexical richness,syntactical complexity,cohesion and coherence in the pre-and post-test,and the horizontal comparison between the experimental class and the control class,the changes in their reading and writing performance after receiving the genre-based pedagogy were analyzed.To gain further information about the mechanism under these changes,the researcher chose 2 students from the high,middle and low proficiency groups respectively to carry out one-to-one interviews,learning more about their cognitive and emotive changes in face of continuation tasks.The results reveal that genre-based pedagogy can improve high school students’ English writing performance in continuation tasks.Their improvement in three specific aspects can be concluded as follows:(1)In terms of lexical richness,they make progress in lexical sophistication.They can not only make full use of the language scaffolding provided by the teacher,but also actively accumulate sophisticated vocabulary according to the characteristics of the narrative genre.(2)The syntactic complexity of the students’ subsequent writing does not show significant progress.On the one hand,the limited grammatical knowledge of Senior 1 students restricts their use of complex sentence patterns.On the other hand,it can be viewed as the result of students’ increased genre awareness,for narratives have lower requirements for sentence complexity compared with genres such as argumentative essay.(3)In terms of cohesive devices,the frequency of students’ use of additive conjunctions has increased significantly,indicating that they can create richer ideas when continuing a story.In addition,the frequency of lexical repetition used by high-and middle-level students has risen significantly,indicating that their writing length increased,and they will consciously conceive the content of continuation based on the clues in the preceding text.For low-level students,the use of temporal conjunction has been improved while the use of pronominal reference has dropped,which reflects that their understanding of the narrative genre has improved.In terms of coherence,experimental class students,especially middle-level students,use more causal verbs after the experiment,which means that they have made progress in using the characters’ behaviors and activities to promote plot development.From the above results,a conclusion can be made that the application of genre-based pedagogy to continuation task has important implications for teaching writing in China.If teachers can fully deconstruct the given text,provide scaffolding,and provide effective feedback for students in writing teaching,they can not only improve students’ writing performance,but also boost their confidence in reading and writing.In practical applications,teachers should also pay attention to the following points:(1)Teachers should help students do continuation of texts in different genres and build sufficient language scaffolding so as to enlarge the students’ vocabulary and thus increase the lexical density and variety.(2)With the increase in their grammatical knowledge,the students should be encouraged to use different and complex structures so as to improve their syntactic complexity.(3)Under the guidance of the genre-based teaching method,highand intermediate-level students are better at using lexical repetition to establish cohesion within the continued part.Teachers can further impart more complex cohesive devices such as synonyms and antonyms to avoid frequent repetition which will make the text monotonous;for low-level students,it is necessary to instruct them to use more cohesive means besides temporal cohesive words.