A Comparative Study Of "Product Approach" And "Process Genre Approach" To The Writing Teaching Of English Majors

Writing ability is always considered to be a crucial part in EFL learners' language competence. Ever since 1960s', researchers have proposed and developed a series of approaches for writing teaching: the product approach, the process approach, and the genre approach, etc. However, these approaches are not without their limitations. Under such circumstances, Badger & White (2000) put forward a new approach, the process genre approach, which was considered to be a synthesis integrating the advantages of the product approach, process approach and genre approach together and thus, eliminating their disadvantages (Han, 2001).Despite the prosperous situation in the research field, in the Chinese EFL writing classroom, most of the teachers still use the traditional product approach. There are some researches aiming at discovering process genre approach's effectiveness, but most of them focus on teaching writing in senior high school. This thesis, based on an empirical study on the effectiveness of product approach and process genre approach, tries to test which approach is more effective in improving college English majors' English writing proficiency.There are two research hypotheses; 1. process genre approach is more effective than the traditional product approach in improving college English majors' writing proficiency; 2. students can improve their awareness of self-revision, and thus, make fewer errors in the compositions after the training of process genre approach. The subjects are 30 English majors from the Elementary Educational School of Chongqing Normal University. After the experiment which lasted for 19 weeks, the data was collected and analyzed by means of SPSS 13.0. The results turn out to be: 1. the process genre approach can better improve the writing ability of Chinese college English majors; 2. the students who have received the training of process genre approach made fewer errors in their compositions than those who were taught by product approach.The present paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter One, serves as an introduction to the background of the research, the purpose of the thesis and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is a holistic historical review of writing approaches, in which four approaches of writing teaching are introduced. Chapter Three is a description of this experiment, and it demonstrates the procedures of the experiment: teaching with the product approach in the control class and teaching with the process genre approach in the experimental class.Chapter Four is the analysis and discussion of the students' scores of their compositions in the pre-test and post-test, and the error numbers in their compositions. This chapter aims to compare the students' achievement in writing and discover in what aspects the two approaches influence their writing proficiency, after a semester's training.Chapter Five concludes the thesis. The findings of the experiment are summarized. Pedagogical implications are provided and limitations of the present study are pointed out.