A Study On Application Of The Process-genre Approach In Teaching Of College English Writing

It goes without saying that English as an international language is very importantunder the background of globalization, which puts forward higher requirements forChinese college students. However, traditional writing teaching approach containstheir enthusiasm for learning English writing to some degree. Besides, the studentscannot get enough language input and writing skills in traditional writing class. As anew synthetic teaching approach, the process-genre approach integrates theadvantages of the product approach, the process approach and the genre approach.The process-genre approach can also guarantee the various input of writingknowledge and skills, promote the interaction among students, texts and the societyand stimulate the students’ writing motivation and interest. Furthermore, it can helpthe students actively take part in the writing process and build up their confidence.The paper first studied the process-genre approach thoroughly and then applied itin the teaching of college English writing to see if it is effective in improving thecollege students’ writing competence. The subjects of this experiment are twoseparate classes of70non-English major freshmen from Chang Chun Normaluniversity. This experiment works to answer the following two questions:1.How does the process-genre approach improve college students’ Englishwriting competence?2. How does the process-genre approach change the attitudes and habits of thestudents towards English writing and arouse their interest in writing?The research combines the qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze theresults. Then the author gets the following findings:1. The results show that theprocess-genre approach improves college students’writing in terms of vocabulary use,grammatical structure as well as discourse. The English writing competence in termsof discourse in the Control group is almost the same before and after the experimentand slightly higher in terms of vocabulary use and grammatical structure. However, inthe Experiment group, the obvious improvement of writing can be found in everyaspect, such as vocabulary use, grammatical structure and discourse.2. With the analysis of the questionnaire and the in-depth interview, it is found that the studentsunder the guide of the process-genre approach have made a positive change towardsEnglish writing in terms of attitude and habit. They have strengthened theirconfidence in writing and built up good writing habit. However, the students under theguide of the traditional approach also have made positive changes. Although thereexist some statistic differences in the change of writing habits between the two groups,the difference is not much significant.