The Application Of Genre-based Approach To English Reading Instruction In Senior High School

Reading plays an essential and important role in senior high school English teaching.It is the main object of English teaching to develop students reading comprehension ability.The New Curriculum Standards of Senior High School English(NCS)and the trend of the National Matriculation English Test(NMET)set forth high requirements on the depth and breadth of the discourse understanding for senior high students.Genre-based instructing approach is one of the methods of discourse analysis,which combines linguistic analysis with genre analysis and schema theory tightly.Since 1980 s,the approach is very popular especially in America and Australia.Many linguists have made a lot of research on genre-based teaching,which is especially applied to English writing teaching.The study applies the genre-based approach to English reading teaching,aiming to explore the effectiveness of the approach in senior high school English reading teaching.The research hypotheses of this study are raised as follows:1.The genre-based reading instruction can increase learners' awareness of genre when they analyze discourses.2.Compared with the traditional English reading teaching,the genre-based reading instruction is more beneficial to improving students' comprehension ability.3.Compared with the traditional English reading teaching,the genre-based reading instruction is more beneficial to arousing students' reading interests.4.Compared with the traditional English reading teaching,the genre-based reading instruction is more beneficial to improving students' using reading strategies.The researcher conducts the experiment in Yuci No.2 senior high school in Jinzhong of Shanxi Province.The subjects in this study are students in Grade one,and class A and class B are set as the control class and the experimental class respectively according to their entrance examination.The research instruments are mainly questionnaires and tests,while the interviews are also used as an complementary instruments.In order to prove the validity,the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis are used in the experiment.Pre-questionnaire mainly aims to investigate the actual reading status of students,while post-questionnaire aims to find the of students' changes in EC and CC after one term study.Two reading comprehension test papers are used before and after the experiment in order to check whether the students' reading score is improved and whether there are significant differences between EC and CC.Finally,the results of the data are analyzed and discussed through independent samples T-test and paired samples T-test,using software SPSS 19.0.The result of tests shows that the mean score of the students in EC has obviously improved and better than that in CC,while the standard deviation is gradually reduced,which indicates that not only the mean score of the students is improved,but also the gap between each student in the experimental class is reduced.Besides,the results of questionnaires and interviews suggest that students' reading interests are stimulated gradually,and their cooperative and autonomous learning ability and genre awareness in EC have been greatly improved after one term training under genre-based reading instruction approach.What's more,students in EC express their satisfactions with this approach,by which their reading initiative,reading skills,reading habits have also been improved gradually.This study shows that the application of genre-based approach to English reading instruction in senior high school is feasible and effective.