Process Genre Approach And Its Pedagogical Implications For College English Writing

English writing as a valuable productive and communicative skill has been treated as a focus of language teaching and research. However, writing was always regarded as the most difficult one of the four basic language skills and relegated to the last stage in our teaching arrangement.This thesis sets out to examine college non-English majors' writing problems and the underlying causes. 119 sophomores of Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology were chosen at random to take part in the study. Then, the present writer reviewed the related approaches in teaching writing in detail. In the field of writing instruction, product approach, process approach and genre approach are three dominant approaches in Chinese writing classes. The product approach holds that successful writing is based on one's linguistic knowledge, therefore emphasizes correct usage, correct grammar, and correct spelling, but it neglects the development of students' writing at textual level. The process approach describes writing process as a communicative activity instead of the writer's personal activity; however, it ignores the variation in discourse types and in students' level. The genre approach takes the purpose of writing into consideration and gives particular attention to the rhetorical organization of the texts; however it has its own weaknesses, too.After the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, the present writer introduces the necessity and feasibility of combining the three approaches and adopts process genre approach (Badger & White, 2000). The principles of process genre approach are: writing takes place in a social context, and is a reflection of a particular purpose; through the analysis of model text and discussion with fellow learners and teachers, learners can get input from teachers, fellow learners and text; in the process of writing, learners can get both linguistic knowledge and strategy training. In the description of the process genre approach, Badger and White did not put forward the explicit steps that can be operated with in the writing instruction. However, process genre approach has been drawing increasing attention in the field of teaching writing since it was proposed in 2000, and in order to apply the...