A Study Of Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools On The Basis Of Process-genre Approach

Writing is one of the four language skills for communication, which can not onlyhelp students internalize linguistic knowledge effectively but also foster students’ability of using language comprehensively. It is also the important standard formeasuring the effectiveness of English teaching. However, English writing is the mostdifficult to teach, and is always ignored in senior high schools. Therefore, it isworthwhile to do some research on how to improve students’ English writingproficiency.Based on the present writing situation and the requirement of the new Englishcurriculum standards for writing in senior high schools, this thesis aims to apply theprocess-genre teaching method to the instruction of writing in order to improvestudents writing’ ability. A new integrated model: process-genre teaching method wasput forward by Badger and White (2000). This writing teaching model proposes thatwriting involves knowledge about language (as in the product and genre approach)，knowledge of the context and the purpose for writing(as in the genre approach) andskills in using language(as in the process approach). In this model, under the teacher’sguide, students are expected to summarize the characteristics of relevant genre, and usewriting skills to finish the final composition.In this thesis a teaching experiment was carried out to test whether the processgenre-approach can improve high school students’ writing proficiency. The experimentwas designed to answer the following three questions:(1) Compared with thetraditional product approach, can the process-genre approach enhance students’ writingability?(2) Can the process-genre approach inspire students’ interests in writing andimprove their awareness of self-correction and cooperation?(3) Can peer editing in theprocess of writing help students improve writing competence? One hundred studentsfrom Yancheng Middle School were chosen as subjects in the experiment. Two classesof students with the same English proficiency were randomly chosen, one as the experimental class and the other as the control class. The experiment lasted one term.The whole study includes a pretest, a posttest and three questionnaires. The data formthe pretest and posttest is entered into statistical software SPSS17.0to analyze thefigure taken from the questionnaire.The results show that the process-genre approach is effective to improve students’interests in writing and enhance their writing proficiency. Therefore, the process-genreteaching method is one of the effective ways to improve senior high school students’writing ability.