Application Of Process Genre Approach To Junior High School English Writing Class

As one of the four basic skills of English,writing is an important way to communicate with others and to consolidate the linguistic knowledge one has already learnt.Students' writing ability can mirror their comprehensive English proficiency to a large extent.However,due to the pressure of examinations in China,teachers often put more emphasis on input skills rather than output skills,especially writing,which has led to the unsatisfactory situation of writing.Therefore,it is urgent to apply an effective approach to improve students' writing competence.This study employs process genre approach to instruct students' writing and is intended to optimize the traditional product approach.Process genre approach,as a new synthesized approach,was first proposed by Badger and White in 2000.They deemed that writing consists of linguistic knowledge,context knowledge,communicative purpose and writing skills.It is not only a process of output,but also a process of internalizing linguistic knowledge and constructing the generic structure of specific genre on the basis of students' writing skills.This study will apply process genre approach to junior high school English writing class,aiming to examine whether it is effective to improve students' writing ability.Thus,the author puts forward three research questions:1.What are the effects of process genre approach on students' attitude towards writing?2.In what aspects can process genre approach help students to improve their writing ability?3.How can process genre approach benefit students of different English writing levels?To answer the above questions,the author conducted an experiment in Baoji No.1 Middle School from March to June in 2017.Two classes from the eighth grade were invited to the experiment:Class one(43 students)and Class nine(45 students).The two parallel classes were both taught by the author and Class one(the experimental class)was instructed by process genre approach while Class nine(the control class)was instructed by traditional product approach.The study was supported by the constructivism theory,Flower and Hayes' cognitive process writing theory,genre analysis theory and schema theory.The instruments were questionnaires,tests and interview.Before the experiment,the author would analyze the results of the pre-questionnaire and pre-test to learn about students' attitude towards writing and the present situation of writing.After a four-month experiment,it came to the post-questionnaire and the interview.As last,the author used the SPSS 20.0 to compare and analyze the data and drew the conclusion.It is found out that process genre approach is very effective to improve students'writing ability in terms of content,organization and language,although the degree of improvement are different because of students' different English level.This approach contributes to students' positive attitude towards writing,good habits of writing and high awareness of genre as well as students' efficient interaction in class.The roles of teachers and students also make a great change,from teachers' dominance to students'active participation,which has enhanced students' learning autonomy.This study introduces process genre approach to junior high school English writing class,which conforms to the requirements of the New English Curriculum Standards and it is beneficial to achieve student-oriented class.Moreover,the experiment has improved students' writing ability,which provides a good reference to English writing teaching in the future.Whereas,due to the insufficient teaching experience,the thesis also has some limitations and still needs being improved.