Genre Approach In The Teaching Of English Reading

As it is known to all that reading plays an important part in foreign language teaching, especially to the students. However, in teaching practice we find although we have spent lots of time and efforts and tried to select various kinds of materials for reading practicing, the result is not satisfactory. As far as the teachers are concerned, in order to improve the students' reading competence we not only need to master reading theories and learning strategies, but also apply them to practice to instruct teaching. Only by following this, we can make teaching more effective. The present thesis intends to present a new way for teaching reading—genre-based teaching approach, which is based on genre and genre analysis theories. It provides a new way to teach English reading and it aims at improving students' reading competence and communicative competence by providing them with a series of genre knowledge and helping them have the awareness of generic conventions under certain social and cultural contexts.Genre-based teaching approach is a new way which came into being in the middle of 1980s. During recent twenty years, foreign language-teaching experts have paid great attention to it and applied in the teaching of writing, but it is rarely applied in the teaching of reading in our country. Therefore, in this thesis, genre-based teaching approach is attempted to be applied in the teaching of reading with the purpose of enhancing students' knowledge about the structures of texts and language points, and more importantly to promote the improvement of students' reading competence.In the first part, this thesis explains theoretically whether and how genre-based teaching approach can improve the students' reading competence. Firstly, the concept of genre-based teaching approach and current teaching approaches of it are given. And it introduces different schools' understanding of genre. Then it analyzes the relationship between the new approach and text analysis and schema theories. Finally, in order to prove this approach has a positive effect on students' reading competence, the result of an experiment has been described.The result indicates that it can improve students' reading competence. After three months' reading practicing the students in Class A who received genre-based teaching approach are superior to the students in Class B who received traditional teaching approach in their reading competence. The difference is significant, so a conclusion is drawn: genre-based teaching approach is better than the traditional one in the process of reading teaching.