The Application Of The Genre-based Approach To Reading Teaching In Senior Middle School

Reading is an important means to get information for people.Reading plays an essential role in middle school English teaching.Since the mid-1980s, the genre-based approach has enjoyedconsiderable popularity all over the world. It applies genre andgenre analysis theories to English teaching and aims to helpstudents to know about the communicative purposes, text structuresand language features of different genres so that students’comprehensive language ability is improved.The present paper is based on the theories of genre and genreanalysis and applies the genre-based approach to English readingteaching, aiming to explore the effectiveness of the approach insenior middle school English reading teaching. The researcher madea literature review of related theories and application of genreand found that few researches are about the western area, especiallyGuizhou. The researcher chose100students from two classes ofGrade1of Guiyang No.6Middle School as the experimental subjectsand chose reading comprehension tests, questionnaire surveys andclassroom observation as experimental instruments. When theresearch is in while-experiment, genre analysis was used to analyzethe discourse structures and language features of the narration,exposition and argumentation. The present paper used SPSS and both the Independent Samples T-test and the Paired Samples T-test toanalyze the data of reading comprehension tests and questionnaires.It has some major findings as follows: Firstly, the genre-basedapproach can improve different levels of students’ readingcomprehension ability and strategy using, help them form a goodreading habit, cultivate their genre awareness, and stimulate theirreading confidence and interests. Secondly, the genre-based is morehelpful to excellent students. Thirdly, students are quiteinterested in the new approach.