A Research Of Using Process-Genre Approach To Enhance The High School Student's English Writing Ability

As everyone knows, English writing is very important. The cultivation of English writing ability is the main task for English teaching in Middle Schools. It is also an important quality standard of teaching. Actually, English writing is one of the most difficult aspects both for students and for teachers. Nowadays product approach, process approach and genre approach are three dominant approaches in Chinese writing classes. In order to improve students' writing ability, most researchers have focused on the application of one approach. However, they have not achieved the expected results.The author thinks that a single approach is not valid under all circumstances. Therefore, after the analysis of students' problems in writing and the causes of the problems, the author analyzes the advantages and the disadvantages of each approach. Then, the author introduces the necessity and feasibility of combining the three approaches and adopts process-genre approach proposed by Badger &White (2000). Based on the main ideas of process-genre approach, the author analyzes the principles of the process- genre approach: writing is embedded in a social situation, and is a reflection of a particular purpose; students can learn both linguistic knowledge and writing strategies in the process of writing; students can get input from three potential sources: the teacher, other students and examples of the target genre; teachers facilitate the writing process, student-centered, interactive and collaborative teaching context-constructed, task-based and collaborative writing can stirring up their interest in learning and writing, promote interaction and active participation to help build up their confidence in writing freely.To help teachers apply the approach flexibly, a three-stage to operate by is presented. In the pre-writing, the teacher should assign task to gather information before class, then select a typical article of a certain genre as a model, organize students to analyze the social context and communicative purpose of the genre as well as the generic structure and linguistic characteristics of the article and summarize its framework together. In the writing, there is seven-step: brainstorm, imitate, draft or creative writing, exchange draft, revising and getting feedback, second drafting and presentation. By imitating, students can have a better understanding of the genre and internalize the characteristics of the genre to construct a framework as their schema knowledge. In the post writing, the following steps are rewrite, recite the model and make a wall display.This experiment bases primarily on the constructivism, input and output theorizes to explore and apply process-genre approach to teaching writing that may be suitable for Chinese school and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility. The study attempts to answer the following research questions:1) Is process-genre approach an effective writing approach in Senior Middle School?2) Can students' writing ability, in content, structure and language be enhanced through the new approach?The subjects are 102 students in senior three from an ordinary high school in Shangdu County. During three months' instructional intervention, the teacher carried out the process-genre approach to teaching writing in the EC. Four instruments were used in the research: two questionnaires, observation and interview related to writing attitudes and beliefs; scores of two compositions in the aspects of content, structure and language. By analyzing the collected data, the research finds: 1) Process-genre is an effective approach; the students from EC were feeling more confident in writing than before. They gained interest in writing and welcomed this new approach to teaching writing. Their attitudes and beliefs towards writing changed dramatically. 2) The students' ability in content, language and structure-has improved greatly.The study result shows that the subjects under the instruction of process-genre approach achieve more significant growth in English writing proficiency and interest in writing, build up more awareness of cooperation and confidence in writing, improve their abilities of independent thinking and problem-solving more effectively than those under the product approach instruction. Therefore, it is a short-cut method of raising students' proficiency in writing. It gives some new insights on our current teaching practice in EFL writing classes. It is hoped that this thesis will help English teachers of the Chinese Senior Middle School have a better understanding of the process writing and more and more teachers can apply this approach to their own teaching practice.