Genre Theory And The Teaching Of EFL Writing

The present study reports an empirical study on the effects of genre-based method in the teaching of writing to 90 Chinese English majors in their third semester in a college. It aims to find out whether the genre-based method is more effective than the traditional Chinese EFL writing method in improving students' communicative competence. Specifically, two assumptions are made in this study:1. The genre-based method is more effective than the traditional EFL writing method in improving students' socio-linguistic competence and discourse competence;2. Its effectiveness in improving students' linguistic and strategic competence cannot be seen for the time being.In order to test the above hypothesis, the study undertook a pretest/posttest equivalent groups design and used a convenience sample, which was two intact classes from an intact college — Class One and Class Two as respectively the control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG).The research tools used in the present study include: a questionnaire with the writing teachers to find out how they went about EFL writing teaching before the treatment; a pretest and a posttest that were used to measure the students' English writing proficiency; a questionnaire to investigate the students' attitude to the genre-based method after the posttest.In the experiment an experienced writing teacher and the author taught the CG and EG respectively with the schedule and setting of teaching for the two groups being kept nearly the same. For the experiment, the CG adopted the traditional EFL writing method while the EG adopted the genre-based method.The data from the questionnaires were summarized manually. For the data of scores, an independent samples z-test was undertaken by means of SPSS.The independent samples z-test revealed significant difference in the overall score and discourse, socio-linguistic competence while there is no significant difference in linguistic and strategic competence between the CG and EG. That is to say, the assumptions had been confirmed. In addition, the questionnaire revealed that almost 97%...