Genre Approach To English Writing In Senior High School

English writing, as one of the basic four language skills, is being paid more and more attention to nowadays. However, on the one hand, the present writing situation is not optimistic. Many students find it difficult to communicate by means of writing effectively. Besides, the traditional writing method has little effect on their writing ability. On the other hand, the New English Curriculum Standard has set a higher demand for writing tests. On the basis of the framework of genre and genre analysis, the genre-based approach is applied to the classroom consciously, and the teaching activities are centered on the schematic structure. As far as most researches engaged in genre are concerned at present, the genre-based teaching approach is mainly applied to college English writing. In order to improve the writing situation effectively in Senior High School, the author attempts to draw in the genre approach in writing instruction.The present study is undertaken to find out whether the genre approach is more helpful to improve the students'writing ability. For this reason, this study reports an empirical study on the effects of the genre approach in writing instruction to 142 students in Senior One from the author's school. Therefore, the hypothesis is:the genre-based approach is more effective than the traditional writing method in Senior High School. In order to test the above hypothesis, the author undertook a pre-test and post-test equivalent group design, whose subjects came from two natural classes from the author's school respectively as the experimental group (EG) and the controlled group (CG). In the experimental design, the EG adopted the genre-based approach while the CG adopted the traditional writing method, with the schedule and setting of teaching for the two groups being the same. The research tools were a pre-test and a post-test that were used to measure the students'writing proficiency. And for the data of scores, an Independent Samples T-test and a Paired Samples Test were undertaken by means of SPSS 11.0.Before the experiment, the test result revealed that no significant difference existed between EG and CG, which showed they were equivalent. After a term's study, the author chose the final-exam, a relatively comprehensive test, as a post-test. Also, by means of t-test, there was significant difference between them, showing the EG was superior to the CG. In order to make the results more convincing, the author also carried out Paired Samples Test. That is to say, the scores of pre-test and post-test of every group had a respective comparison. The results indicated that the EG had significant difference between pre-test and post-test while the CG had little significant difference. To sum up the above scientific test, the hypothesis the paper put forward previously had been prove efficient.