Effect Of "Process Genre Approach" To English Writing Teaching

As early as1960s, the writing teaching approaches such as those of product, process and genre have been proposed by researchers and later been further developed. Those approaches have their respective strengths, while they are not without limitations. Based on the debate "which approach is better" and on the comparison and analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches, Badger and White (2000) propose a new approach-"process genre approach" by synthesizing the above three approaches, aiming at integrating their advantages and eliminating their disadvantages. Though certain researches have been done on the function of "process-genre approach", most of them are concentrated on teaching writing for college students. Students from joint education projects have their own characteristics and their special learning styles. Since little research has been done in this field, the empirical study is critical.Based on the following research hypotheses:1. process genre approach can better arouse students’ interest in English writing;2. process genre approach can help students analyze the genre of argumentative writing and make them fully involved in the writing process, thus help them improve their writing, the author makes an empirical study on the effectiveness of process genre approach, compared with product approach.Statistics from pre-test and post-test of the students’ writing is collected and analyzed by SPSS16.0, in addition to an in-depth interview.Finally, the author gets positive answers to those hypotheses. There is a sharp contrast between the pre-score and post-score of students from experimental class, while the difference is insignificant for the controlled class. Students from experimental class make longer sentence units, fewer language mistakes and have more to say in their writing. Based on the major findings, the author poses the pedagogical implications as follows:firstly, changing of the teacher and learner’s role in process genre approach; secondly, advocating cooperative learning in the process of teaching writing; thirdly, cultivating students’ audience awareness and fourthly, combining writing with reading.The empirical study in this thesis shows that as long as the instructors guide them properly, joint education students have great potentials in their writing proficiency.