An Empirical Study Of Process Genre Approach To College English Writing Instruction For Basic Requirements

Writing, as a complex productive skill, has been the most difficult section for students among the macro-skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. To help college students enhance their writing and to find a feasible and effective teaching model, this study details the application of Process Genre Approach to writing instruction at the beginning of college years. Meanwhile, this method is expected to cultivate students'interests and habits of learning. Thus, they can lay a solid foundation for their further English learning.Process Genre Approach is viewed as an integration of Product Approach, Process Approach and Genre Approach. However, never can it be regarded as the simple integration of the three approaches because other teaching theories, like Input Hypothesis Theory, Schema Theory and Cooperative Learning Theory, can support Process Genre Approach. Since 2000 when Badger and White put forward this approach, researches on the application of Process Genre Approach have been widely carried out in the field of English teaching, like Business English writing, writing for English majors, and Senior High School English writing. In these researches, the authors present their own teaching procedures according to the level of their students. Therefore, there is no universal teaching procedure for this approach. When adopting this approach, teachers should adjust the teaching procedure or model to make it suitable to students. According to College English Requirements, three requirements are established: Basic Requirements, Intermediate Requirements, and Advanced Requirements. Up to now, few researches have been done on the application of Process Genre Approach in college English writing for Basic Requirements. Then, this study, based on Process Genre Approach and other teaching theories, initially presents the detailed procedure of College English teaching for Basic Requirements. Therefore, this study is innovative.To check the effect of Process Genre Approach in college English writing teaching for Basic Requirements, a teaching experiment was carried out in the first semester of school year in 2009-2010. 80 subjects were chosen from two natural classes (50 in each class) in Grade One from Clinic College of Hebei Medical University. All subjects, based on their natural classes, were divided into Control Group (CG) and Experimental Group (EG) and their scores of Pre-test showed no significantly statistical difference. Based on the same teaching content and textbooks, Product Approach and Process Genre Approach were implemented in CG and EG. The experiment lasted for 15 weeks. The Pre-test was held to choose subjects, and then after each five-week period, the Writing quiz, Post-test and CET-4 writing test were administered. The results of data analysis show that there is a significantly statistical difference on the scores of the two groups in Post-test and CET-4 writing test, which proves the effectiveness of Process Genre Approach in enhancing students'writing. With the help of questionnaires and the in-depth interview, it was found that students in EG gained more interests, more positive attitudes towards learning. In addition, students in EG made more progress at lexical and syntactical level. Thus, this experiment is successful and fruitful, and the research purposes are fully achieved.