An Integrated Process-genre Approach To Enhancing Non-English Majors' Writing Competence At Discourse Level

With China's ever-increasing international exchanges in the last decades, having a good command of English is becoming important for not only English majors but also non-English majors. As one of the four basic language skills, writing is quite complicated but very important. However, the English writing competence of the Chinese non-English majors has been regrettably lingering at a low level especially at discourse level. The previous studies show that the major problems facing the students in discourse writing can be classified into two categories, that is, they do not know "what to write" and "how to write"; moreover, the present study conducts a survey about the status quo of the students'writing. The specific problems existing in their writings are identified as poor content, incomplete generic structure, ineffective use of the common English discourse patterns, and lack or misuse of cohesive devices. The participants are 54 freshmen from the same class of Jiangsu University.In order to find an effective teaching approach to improve the students'writing competence at discourse level, this study reviews the previous studies in recent years on Chinese college English writing teaching, focusing on the three related approaches---product approach, process approach and genre approach, as well as the process-genre approach put forward by Badger and White as a synthesis of the three approaches. It is discovered that there exist at least three problems in the exploration of the process-genre approach.(1) Up to now, it seems that the theoretical basis of the process-genre approach has not been explicitly expounded;(2) The teaching procedures in previous studies are not detailed enough for practical writing teaching;(3) The previous studies are not quite suitable to solve the problems in the non-English majors' discourse writings.Based on the previous studies, this research proposes an Integrated Process-genre Approach (hereafter IPGA), aiming to solve the problems in the non-English majors' writing so as to enhance their writing ability at discourse level. Meanwhile, this study tries to answer the following questions:(1) What is the IPGA?(2) What's the theoretical basis and teaching model of the IPGA? (3) How effective is the IPGA in enhancing the non-English majors'writing competence at discourse level?According to the problems discovered in the previous survey, the present research argues that the related theories of discourse analysis and Hasan's Generic Structure Potential theory (hereafter GSP) should be introduced into the theoretical basis of the IPGA. The present study also attempts to design the teaching model for IPGA which pays particular attention to the cultivation of the students'ability in discourse construction. The detailed procedures for teaching practice are:the analysis of two model texts, group discussion over the writing of the given assignment, creative writing, getting feedback and revising, and final drafts;At last, a case study is conducted by applying the IPGA model to the teaching of argumentative writing. Throughout the teaching experiment (including the first writing in the survey), the participants are asked to complete three writing tasks and then scored. To ensure the reliability and validity of scoring, two sets of scoring criteria are adopted. They are the holistic scoring criteria for CET-4 and the analytic scoring criteria which is designed by referring to H.K. Lee's Feature analysis form and the scoring criteria of IELTS writing. The items scored in the latter criteria are content, GSP, discourse pattern and cohesion. All the data gained are processed by SPSS 16.0. Results show that the holistic scores for both the second and third writing tasks are higher than those for the first writing task, but scores of the third task are obviously lower than the those of the second one. The same is true of the analytic scores for content, GSP, discourse pattern. Therefore, a conclusion can be safely drawn as follows:the IPGA has a positive effect on cultivating and enhancing students' writing ability in discourse writing, especially in terms of content, GSP, discourse pattern. Under the instruction guided by the IPGA model, students'writing ability at discourse level has been significantly promoted, but to maintain that effect or even make further progress, they need more of such writing instructions and practice.