A Study On The Application Of Process-genre Approach To Senior Two English Writing Teaching In Rural Areas

With the fast development of the current society and close communication in the international community, English as an international communication tool is becoming more and more important. In our country, after promulgation of the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools (Trial) in 2003, senior high students’ English proficiency has been greatly improved, especially their listening ability and speaking ability. While for majority of them, English writing is still a very difficult skill to develop, especially for students in poor rural areas. So, it is still an extremely urgent task for our English teachers to improve their writing ability. Nowadays, the popular writing approaches in middle school English classes are the product, process and genre approaches. Of the three approaches, the product approach is the most widely used one. By systematical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of them, two professors, Richard Badger and Goodith White at Stirling University England, proposed a synthetic approach--the process-genre approach in 2000. After that, this approach has gained much attention from researchers and been applied to practical teaching in China quickly. But most of the domestic studies are done by researchers’ choosing the students with better English foundation in urban areas, and few researchers choose students in rural areas in experiments.For this reason, the author chooses a typical rural senior high school---Xuan Han High School as an example and adopts the new English writing approach---the process-genre approach to teach English writing with the purpose of proving the effectiveness and feasibility of this approach.In this paper, the author will try her best to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the process-genre approach in Senior Two, Xuan Han High School. And the author will explore to solve the following two research questions:(1) What’s the teaching effect of the process-genre approach in rural high schools? (2)How to adopt suitable writing approaches to meet the reality of rural high schools?In order to do the experiment, the author chooses two classes in Senior Two: class 8 and class 25, with the former the Control Group and the latter the Experimental Group. During the experiment, the author adopts the process-genre approach to teach English writing in the Experimental Group and the traditional product approach in the Control Group. Before the experiment, the author employs the first monthly test in Senior Two as the pre-test and finds that there is no significant difference between students’ writing ability in the two classes. While after the experiment, the author uses the final exam of the first semester in Senior Two as the post-test and discovers that students in both the two classes have made great progress in their writing, but students in the Experimental Group make greater progress than the students in the Control Group. This results suggest that both the product approach and the process-genre approach can effectively improve students’ writing ability, while process-genre approach are more effective than the product approach. Meanwhile, with the help of questionnaires and interviews, the author discovers that the process-genre approach can effectively arouse students’writing motivation, change their writing attitudes and improve writing habits.This thesis consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, the author firstly analyzes the status quo of English teaching and writing problems in rural high schools. In the second chapter, the literature review, the author shows us three English writing approaches, namely the product approach, the process approach and the genre approach. The author firstly discusses their advantages and disadvantages and then introduces a new writing approach---the process-genre approach. Furthermore, the author elaborates its theoretical basis and teaching procedures. In chapter three, the author shows us the subjects, the instruments and procedures of this experiment. After that, in chapter four, the author presents the findings of the experiments, respectively from the questionnaires, the pre-test and the post-test, and the interviews. The results prove that the process-genre approach is more effective to improve students’ writing ability. Finally, in the last chapter, the author summarizes the advantages of the process-genre approach, the problems found during the experiment and make suggestions for English writing teaching.