A Genre-based Approach To Teaching EFL Summary Writing In Senior High School

With the continuous development and progress of society, there is a higher demanding of English learner s’ writing ability. For senior school students, writing has long been considered to be the most difficult part among the four skills of listening,speaking, reading and writing. Summary writing, which is a kind of comparatively effective method, can be helpful to improve students’ summarization and comprehension ability.Scholars are aware of the importance of writing in interpersonal interaction in recent years, which has resulted in great progress in writing research. Based on genre theory, genre-based approach regards text not just as a linguistic construction, but a social construction. However, the traditional teaching model simply neglects the indispensable cultivation of students’ English writing ability in the process of practical teaching. Confronting a writing task, students always do not know where to start.Based on genre theory, this thesis aims at investigating the effects of genre-based approach on senior high school students’ summary writing.For this reason, the author made a teaching experiment lasting for 8 weeks. The subjects were 40 senior high school students from a middle school in Jiujiang city. A genre-based approach was employed in the experiment. Before the genre-based approach was used, an English summary writing test was adopted as the pre-test.During the experiment, the subjects accepted two-hour training courses of summary writing per week, which begins with a introduction of genre that may enhanced students’ genre awareness, and then led students to focus on genetic features of narrative structure so that students can produce a summary under the guidance of genre theory. After the experiment, another summary writing test was applied as the posttest. The summaries of pre-test and posttest were rated by two teachers in terms of structure, language, content and fluency. Interviews and questionnaire were also used to collect qualitative and quantitative data. SPSS software was adopted to analyze the data. The result shows that genre-based approach was an effective way in improving students’ summary writing ability. There was significant difference between pretest and posttest. In addition, the questionnaire and interview results show that moststudents hold positive attitude toward genre-based approach, and they expect more training to improve their writing abilities in this way.The implication of this study is that teachers should intentionally use genre-based approach to help students improve summary writing ability. They should also choose different texts with different genres. Furthermore, teachers can integrate summary writing with genre analysis, which will make summary writing more effective.