On Improvement Of SMS Students' Writing Ability-from The Perspective Of Genre Theory

Writing is an important way of communication and exchange of emotional feelings in written language. However, in China's English teaching and learning at senior middle schools, the traditional "product approach" , in which exist serious problems of teaching concept, method and evaluation, has been long in a dominant position. Too little attention has been paid to the teaching of writing, which has been marginalized. Teachers merely lay emphasis on writing products, failing to arm students with necessary skills to improve their writing competence. Also, teachers' evaluation is only aimed at writing on the levels of words, phrases, sentences and grammar, and seldom treat writing at the discourse level. Owing to the reasons mentioned above, the Senior Middle Schools Students' writing proficiency is well below the standard required in the current Curriculum Criteria, and the exploration of a new writing method is urgent.The genre-based teaching approach is the application of genre theory which has an advantage over the traditional approach to the teaching of writing in building up students' genre sense and discourse sense. However, it is mainly applied to English teaching in universities, and few people have made a study of its application to teaching writing in senior middle schools. This thesis aims to explore the usefulness, advantages and effectiveness of genre analysis theory in developing senior middle school students' writing ability from the theoretical and practical perspectives.Firstly, the thesis analyzes the existing problems in Senior Middle School Students' writing exercises and points out the disadvantages of the traditional teaching approaches. With the new requirements for genre writing put forward in the current Curriculum Criteria , it is urgent that we explore a new writing teaching method from the perspective of genre. Secondly, the thesis gives an introduction to genre, genre analysis and its application to discourse teaching. Thirdly, the thesis elaborates the correlation between the development of students' writing ability and the three elements of genre analysis: context, discourse structure and figure of speech. Further more, on the basis of genre theory, the author attempts a teaching mode, namely the reading and writing mode, with teaching practice included in the thesis to demonstrate it.Then, the thesis presents an experiment which lasted 24 weeks. The analysis and comparison of the test results between the experimental class and the control class obviously confirmed the effectiveness of genre analysis theory on improving Senior Middle School Students' writing ability. Besides, the analysis also demonstrates that further research is needed in this study, limited by time and space.At the end, a suggestion is put forward that teachers should make the most of the reading materials in SEFC Book3 to develop students' sense of genre and discourse and improve their writing ability.