Genre Analysis And ESP Teaching

With China's entrance into WTO, external exchanges have extended into the wholeof Chinese society and also all fields of science and the economy. As foreigners comedirectly to China for all kinds of investments and for tourism, and as the scientific,industrial and cultural sectors of China step out of the country, all fields demand everincreasing inter-disciplinary talent who are skillful in not only their major but in foreignlanguage as well. In China, colleges and universities serve as the main base of talentdevelopment. Though most of their graduates may be able to read masterpieces and scorewell in various exams, they may feel at a loss in practice when a foreign languagecapacity is actually required. As it often happens that they can't understand Englishproduct manuals, contracts or business documents when required to write or translatethem. All these reveal the weaknesses of college English teaching in our country, whichcan't adapt itself to the times. Therefore, a contradiction between the lack of ESP(English for specific purposes) teaching and the need of talented people due to thedevelopment of society is gradually emerging, and ESP teaching is more desperatelyneeded now than ever before. Presently, the ESP teaching in China is very backward andremains at the stage of traditional teaching whose teaching focus is still on the analysis ofsingle sentences and grammatical rules, which fail to meet the requirements of the timesand can't satisfy the current needs of training ESP talents. Thus, a new and appropriateapproach is greatly needed in the ESP teaching.In recent years, genre analysis has been a public-concern area and comprises a newresearch project in stylistic analysis and discourse analysis, aiming at studying theircommunicative purposes and strategies in language use. Genre analysis goes beyond thesurface-level description of language;rather, it attempts to interpret the deep-levelrationale of discourse construction, examines the social and cognitive factors behinddiscourse structure, and reveals the special form of realization of communicativepurposes and the regularity of discourse construction. With the development of the genreanalysis theory, it is gradually applied to language teaching, especially to ESP teaching,resulting in the genre-based approach based on the theory of genre analysis. As for ESP,it has high structural formation, definite communicative purpose, communicative subjectand particular topic, making its discourse form different from other styles of discourse,thus, ESP teaching is more suitable for the implementation of a genre-based teachingapproach. Although the genre-based teaching approach is very popular abroad in ESPteaching, it is still in its infancy in China and its theoretical research and practice is alsoinsufficient.Obviously, there is a dearth of studies on ESP teaching in China. Such studies areneeded considering China's actual teaching situation. Thus, motivated by such a researchgap and to meet the need of training qualified learners in ESP, this study aims to exploreESP teaching from the angle of the theory of genre analysis. In this study, a suggestedgenre-based ESP teaching approach and its series of teaching stages are put forward, anda teaching model is also provided so as to illustrate how the teaching stages areimplemented in it. Through a discussion of the application of the suggested genre-basedapproach to ESP teaching, the findings could be summarized as follows: (1) Thegenre-based teaching approach can be an effective tool for teaching reading and writingin the ESP context. (2) The genre-based teaching approach is learner-centered andcognitive. In the long run, it helps students to become increasingly independent andself-directed in their language learning and promotes flexible thinking and informedcreativity. (3) The genre-based teaching approach helps students understand texts notonly as linguistic but also as social, meaningful constructs and also balances the masteryof textual forms with the understanding of the process by which they are composed. (4)The genre-based teaching approach offers students a way which is valuable, gives themconfidence and liberates them from their own fears of producing a text by giving themsecurity. Moreover, it provides a means whereby students can analyze the effectivenessof their own writing and that of others, improving their thinking ability.The study holds certain pedagogical implications. From the present study, it isknown that genre analysis is a potentially powerful pedagogical tool in foreign languageteaching, particularly in ESP teaching. This tool can be used to teach students to buildtheir genre awareness, enable students to increase their reading confidence andenjoyment, help students to transfer their learned knowledge to reading and writing moreeffectively, and require ESP teachers to be more qualified in order to play more roles inacting as a teacher, course designer and materials provider, collaborator, researcher, andevaluator.In summary, by focusing on the application of the theory of genre and genre analysisin linguistics to ESP teaching practice, the study attempts to provide insights into ESPteaching in China, an area that has not been adequately explored. The study also providesESP teaching with a new thought and new angle to serve its teaching practice. It issincerely hoped that the present study will be helpful for ESP teaching and shed light onfurther studies in this field.