An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Process Genre Approach On The Writing Anxiety Of Non-English-Major Students

As the focus of foreign language learning shifts from “teacher-centeredness” to“learning-centeredness”, emotional factors have caused widespread concern. As one of the most effective variables in foreign language learning, English anxiety has important effect on students' individual behavior and academic achievement. Surveys and statistics about CET-4 showed that non-English-major students' writing performance was not satisfactory. As a complex productive and communicative skill, English writing has been treated as the teaching difficult point for a long time and is worthy of being concerned. English writing anxiety is commonly existed in students' English learning. Therefore, exploring proper and effective teaching methods to alleviate the English writing anxiety is particularly urgent and important.The present study intends to apply the Process Genre Approach into college English writing,aiming to explore the effect of the Process Genre Approach on non-English-major students' writing anxiety. The author implemented a 16-week experimental study in the School of Teacher Education in Qilu Normal University in the second academic semester of 2015. Two classes of the university were selected as the experimental class adopting the Process Genre Approach and the control class adopting the traditional teaching method of writing. In order to further explore the changes of students' writing anxiety in EC. Based on students' writing anxiety scores obtained from the pre-test, the students are divided into the low writing anxiety group and the high writing anxiety group. The Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory was adopted as the research instrument in the experimental study and the data collected from the experiment were carefully computed and analyzed through SPSS. The author attempts to figure out the following two questions and provide suggestions for domestic teaching of English writing.(1) Which teaching approach can affect the writing anxiety of non-English- major students,the Process Genre Approach or traditional writing teaching method?(2) Are there any differences in writing anxiety between high writing anxiety group and low writing anxiety group in EC after the application of the Process Genre Approach?The research results show that non-English-major students' writing anxiety is commonly existed in students' English learning. Compared with the traditional writing teaching method, the Process Genre Approach can affect and alleviate the writing anxiety of non-English-major students. What's more, compared with the high writing anxiety group, the Process GenreApproach can more effectively alleviate the low writing anxiety group's writing anxiety. The research indicates that, the Process Genre Approach pays more attention to the writing process rather than the writing product, not only attaches importance to the promotion of language but also pays attention to students' positive emotional experience.Therefore, it proved that the Process Genre Approach is an effective teaching method to alleviate non-English-major students' writing anxiety. On the basis of the research results, the author put forward some pedagogical implications and tentative teaching suggestions on how to alleviate students' English writing anxiety. However, due to some subjective and objective factors, there are some inevitable limitations in this research, e.g. the restraint of the current conditions and the author's capability, the limited experimental time, the existence of uncontrollable variables and the processing and analysis of data was not enough in depth.