Influence Of Process Genre Approach To EFL Seniors' Letter Writing

In terms of skills, producing a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing to do in language. It is something most native speakers never master. For most second language learners the challenges are enormous, particularly for those who study in Senior High School. Recently more and more teachers have realized the importance of writing in English language teaching. It has also been reinforced in the newly promulgated Senior School Curriculum Criterion and new marking criteria of NMET. Many researchers have experienced task-based writing approaches, genre-based writing approaches, content-based approaches, multimedia computer-based writing teaching method and product-oriented approaches. Few researches can be found about middle school students and fewer researches have been done on process genre approaches in senior students' English letter writing. In fact, teaching in this way can encourage the Chinese students, especially for the northwestern students, who are confused by English writing all the time to find their confidence back, offer them an opportunity to learn about their possibilities and limitations and help them to have a clear purpose in English writing.The present thesis is to explore and apply process genre approach to teaching writing, especially to the letters' writing, which will perhaps be more suitable for the senior students in China and which will improve the students' English writing ability. The study proposed the following hypothesis: the process genre approach to EFL writing teaching can influence EFL learners' letter writing ability.The subjects are 90 students from 2 classes of Senior One in No. 3 High School, of Lanzhou, Gansu province. The teacher carried out process genre approach to teach English letter writing in the experimental class for three months and after training, make a comparison between the experimental class and the controlled class and draw the conclusion.The thesis consists of six chapters:In Chapter 1, the importance of EFL letter writing in senior high school and objectives of the present study were introduced.In Chapter 2 the author reviewed researches on the students' English writing of senior high school both at home and abroad and related to the process genre approach.In Chapter 3 the author introduced the main difference between English letters and Chinese letters and the teaching procedure of process genre approach in EFL seniors' letter writing.In Chapter 4 a pilot experiment was presented on writing course and didn't fulfilled the whole procedure scientifically and the results which had aimed at improving the senior students' letter writing abilities were not obvious.In Chapter 5 the author reported the main experiment on writing course and discuss the results of the experiment. The result revealed that students from EC had improved their ability of English letter writing by training of process genre approach.In Chapter 6 a conclusion was drawn to the significance of the present study in EFL teaching and learning and pointed out its limitations and put forward some suggestions for future researches.