An Action Research On Process-genre Writing Teaching

The cultivation of writing ability is a very important task of high school Englishteaching, and is also one of the standards to measure the teaching quality. CurrentSenior High School English Curriculum Standard has clear demand of high schoolEnglish teaching, which regards writing as one of the English language skills and paysmuch attention to cultivating students’ communication ability in writing. Therefore,more and more high school English teachers have realized the importance of writingteaching. However, in practice, writing is always the most difficult part to teach aswell as to learn. In China, the product-oriented writing approach is still the dominantEnglish writing teaching method, which is teacher centered and ignores themotivation of students in learning. This traditional approach goes far from the studentoriented teaching idea and does not conform to the rules of SLA. As a result,exploring an effective writing teaching approach is extremely urgent.According to Badger and White(2000)’s process-genre approach theory, theauthor writes about the background, main features and steps of this approach. Theauthor also tries to summarize a specific and practical approach for high schoolEnglish writing. At the same time, guided by the teaching experience, the author usesthe process-genre approach in the teaching practice and verifies the effectiveness andpossibility of this approach by finishing this action research. All of this is to find amore effective approach to stimulate students’ writing interest, improve their writingability and fulfill the purpose of language skill and communication. Thus students canget an improvement of their comprehensive language ability. This action research triesto answer the following questions:(1) Is the process-genre approach effective in senior high school English writingteaching?(2) Will learners’ writing ability in language skills, content, and structure be improvedby using this new approach? The participants of the research come from Dianchi Senior High School, Grade10.There are126students of all, who are from two classes of this grade. During thefive-month experiment, the author used the process-genre approach in ExperimentalClass and the traditional product approach in Controlled Class. Questionnaires wereused before and after the experiment to test students’ attitude and opinions towardswriting. The pre-tests and post tests served for the data analysis. The final analysis ofquestionnaires and tests show the following results:(1) The process-genre approach is an effective approach in high school Englishwriting teaching. After the experiment, students in Experimental Class are moreconfident and interested in writing and their attitudes and opinions have also changeddramatically.(2) EC students get great improvement in writing contents, language skills and textstructure.The experiment shows that the process-genre approach can improve high schoolstudents’ writing ability and writing interest effectively. It can cultivate good writinghabits and give students more confidence in cooperating with others. This approachjust improves the comprehensive ability of English. Besides, the thesis also mentionsthe findings and implication from the experiment and gives advice for the usage ofprocess-genre approach. It explores China’s EFL writing teaching from a new point.The author hopes that this action research can offer some help for high school Englishteachers in understanding the process-genre approach in order to make them use thisapproach in their teaching practice gradually.The whole thesis consists of five chapters, including the introduction, literaturereview, research methodology, discussion and conclusion. The last chapter concludesthe research and points out the shortcomings, suggestions and the possible researchdirection.