A Study Of The Application Of Process Genre Approach In English Writing Teaching At Senior High School

As an important part of language learning,writing is a significant criterion to measure students' ability of using English.Meanwhile,through writing,students' English ability can be improved from many aspects.It can not only enhance students' logical thinking ability,but also promote their reading and speaking ability.The New English Curriculum has put forward specific requirements for English writing,and writing has become more and more crucial in college entrance examination.However,some learners and teachers are more concentrated on reading,and few of them tends to focus on writing if not for the test.Moreover,most schools do not have English writing class.Teachers pay the least attention to writing,let alone have an appropriate teaching approach.It is possible for teachers to neglect the problems that the students might encounter in writing.When they face a new writing topic,students don't know how to plan their compositions,let alone know what they can write.In view of the above-mentioned facts,this paper attempts to apply process genre approach to English writing teaching at senior high school,which aims to arouse students' interest towards writing and improve their English writing ability.As a kind of synthetic teaching method,process genre approach is to improve students' writing ability from aspects of writing purpose,writing content,writing form and writing techniques.What's more,Constructivism learning theory and genre analysis theory are the theoretical foundation of the thesis.Constructivism learning theory provides a theory basis for the teaching model of process genre approach.And then based on Constructivism learning theory,genre analysis theory gives the teaching model a theoretical guidance of method.Process genre approach not only puts writing activities in a certain social context,but also keeps attention to knowledge on language,rhetorical devices and textual structure.By reading the model essays and teachers' guidance,students can have a general understanding on the features of a certain genre,language features and discourse structure.After that through group discussion,brainstorming and other activities,students are required to write the first draft,then revise it by group members and themselves and at last get the final draft.The writer will test the effectiveness of this approach to English writing teaching at senior high school through experiment.The paper tries to solve the following questions:1.What advantages does the process genre approach have?2.In what aspects process genre approach can improve students' writing ability?In this experiment,the author randomly chooses two parallel classes from Grade Eight.One class is selected as the experimental class which adopts process genre approach in English writing teaching.The other one is the controlled class taught by the traditional teaching method.The study lasts for four months,from September to January.Before the experiment,the two classes are all tested,which proves that the English writing ability of the two classes is approximately the same.After the experiment,in order to prove whether the process genre approach can effectively increase students' English competence compared with the previous methods,the two classes are tested again.At the same time,questionnaires are conducted in the experimental class before and after the experiment,which shows that the students' interest towards writing and writing habits have changed significantly.This study proves that the application of process genre approach can effectively improve students' English writing competence and strengthen their awareness of genre and ability of their cooperative learning.Process genre approach can not only raise students' interest towards English writing,reduce their anxiety in writing,but also help students to develop good writing habits such as reading model essays,drawing an outline,determining the genre and revising.Nevertheless,due to the influence of some objective factors,and the author's limited teaching ability,the experiment still has some shortcomings and needs to be further studied.