The Application Of Genre-based Approach In The English Reading Class Of Senior Middle School

Reading, as one of the four basic skills, plays a significant role in cultivating thestudents’ integrated language ability as well as in English teaching and learning.Reading ability has gradually become one of the most important standards of testingthe students’ language proficiency, which can be proved in the college entranceexamination where reading comprehension takes up nearly a quarter of the total score.That’s why it has always been a hot concern among English educators to improve theteaching of English reading.Under the circumstances of a new-round teaching reform, New EnglishCurriculum Standard of High School has set a higher standard for teachers andstudents on teaching and learning of reading. The cultivation of reading ability notonly pays attention to the language points, but also to the cultivation of students’discourse awareness. That is the reason why the genre-based approach(GBA) drawsthe attention of many English educators and specialists in recent years.GBA is a teaching method based on the genre and genre-analysis theory. It aimsto investigate the genre structure of discourse and to apply it to classroom teaching.Students are supposed to get an overall understanding of the discourse through theguidance of grasping the genre knowledge. GBA has been widely used in thelanguage teaching abroad. However, in China, few studies have been made on it. Dueto the fact that the English teaching materials of senior high schools and the articles ofreading comprehension in the entrance examinations have obvious characteristics ofthe genre, it offers the possibility and necessity for teachers to use GBA in ordinaryEnglish reading class.Therefore, based on reading many relevant materials, the author makes anobservation of the English teaching class, analyzes the questionnares, as well as theteaching materials of senior high schools, and tries to discuss the disadvantages ofsenior high school English reading teaching in the hope of proposing the application of GBA in English reading class of senior high schools. The disadvantages are asfollows: in the pre-reading stage, students’ background knowledge can not be fullystimulated; in the while-reading stage, the GBA is rarely used in English class; in theafter-reading stage, the homework design mainly concentrates on the language points.This paper consists of six parts:The first part is the introduction, which mainly introduces the background, aims,significance, contents and methods of the study.The second part is the literature review, which contains the reading history, thetraditional English reading teaching models and their limitations, the definition ofgenre, the analysis of genre and the related theory of GBA.In the third part, after making a statistical analysis of the genres in the Englishtextbooks of New Senior English for China Student’s (People’s Edition), the writerdraws a conclusion that two genres, that is, narration and exposition, dominate thetextbooks.The fourth part is the observation. Through the examples of classroomobservation and the analysis of the questionnaires, the writer points out someshortages in the current English reading teaching in senior high school.The fifth part is the teaching case design part. Based on the analysis of teachingmaterials, the writer tries to explore how to use the GBA in teaching narrations andexpositions. It also elaborates the advantages and disadvantages of the GBA.In the sixth part, the writer makes some suggestions based on her owncomprehension of the GBA in the hope of doing something effectively for the Englishreading teaching in senior high schools.