The Empirical Study Of Process-Genre Approacb On English Major Writing From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Structure

English writing ability is one of the most important language skills for the college English majors. So far, the product approach has still dominated English major writing teaching. Teacher emphasizes vocabulary, sentence structure, and accurate grammar at the micro-level instead of the genre structure and rhetorical structure at the macro-level. The writing class is filled with relevant writing theories and the amount of exercises about reinforcement of grammar. As a result, students hold that writing class is useless.In recent years, process-genre approach has become the research focus for linguistics and language teachers at home and abroad. Process-genre approach helps students learn the writing purpose, the writing audience and genre structure and language features of the genre. Besides, teacher will help students complete their writings independently and undertake the self-evaluation, and peer-evaluation. But teacher fails to analyze the rhetorical structure. As a result, students’ writings will reflect the flat structure and plain contents without learning the rhetorical structures.In addition, students can not apply writing strategies of audience awareness efficiently.The rhetorical structure is the textual pattern of the genre. The common rhetorical structures are contrast pattern, claim-response pattern, general-specific pattern and problem-solution pattern (Yu Hui2003). Besides, Paltridge (1996) holds that when the discourse was analyzed, if either genre structure or the rhetorical structure is included, students will be taught the incomplete information of discourse construction. Consequently, students’ writings are characteristic of illogic content and flat structure. He proposed that both genre structure and the rhetorical structure were analyzed.Based on the rhetorical structure theory, the paper tends to improve the instructional stages of process-genre approach. Besides, the paper will make an empirical study of the approach instruction to60sophomore English major students from China University of Mining and Technology Yinchuan College.60students from natural classes are divided into a control class and an experimental class. During16weeks experiment, students’ writing attitudes and writing strategies between two classes are investigated by the questionnaire. In addition, based on results of the questionnaire and the argument, the most common genre in TEM-4composition, the experimental class is taught by the process-genre approach integrated with rhetorical structures while the control class is instructed by process-genre approach. Furthermore, composition tests are contrasted between two classes and within the experimental class. The study tends to identify the following questions:1) Can students’ English writing scores be progressed by the process-genre approach integrated with rhetorical structures?2) Are there any changes of the learners’ writing strategies before and after the experiment?3) To what degree do students master the common rhetorical structures of the argument?3groups of pre-test and post-test will be conducted during the experiment.According to the results of the experiment research through Excel2007and SPSS13.0, conclusions are as follows:1) The process-genre approach integrated with rhetorical structures is much more effective than process-genre approach.2) The improved process-genre approach will help students improve writing strategies.3) Except for general-specific pattern, students can master contrast pattern and claim-response pattern for the argument better.The results of the experiment will help students reinforce the learning of the rhetorical structures, change the writing strategies and develop the critical thinking. Besides the teacher will play the role as the organizer and the helper. But there are some limitations. The further research should be made and explored.