Genre-based Approach To High School English Letter Writing Instruction

Writing is one of the four basic language skills in high school students' English learning.However,the ability of students' writing is unfavorable.The reasons can be concluded in several aspects: teachers and students are not aware of the importance of writing subjectively;there isn't enough time for writing teaching and training objectively.The more important reason might be the obsolete idea of writing teaching,which in turn leads to the insufficient reform motivation.On the basis of surveying the relevant writing theories,this paper discusses the current trend of the ideas and methods of writing teaching and then applies the genre-based approach into high school writing teaching through teaching experiment and teaching design.Genre-based approach regards writing as a communicative act targeted at a particular recipient in the social environment.The structure and the language choice of the passage isn't mechanical paragraph reciting,but to achieve the communicative purpose by considering the specific context.As an application of the genre-based approach to writing,we designed a 12-week teaching experiment for high school students in a middle school of Datong,Shanxi Province.Letter writing was taught through the experiment.The participants were from two parallel classes in Grade Two.The Controlled Class(CC)was taught in traditional product-based approach,while the Experimental Class(EC)was taught in genre-based approach.The teaching design in EC was made flexibly according to the teaching model of genre approach in the Australian School.The basic teaching steps include: modeling,joint negotiation and independent construction.From the collected data,it can be seen that the students hold negative attitudes to writing and their letter writing has some problems in content,organization,vocabulary,and language use before the experiment.Through the experiment,the genre-based approach is more effective in improving students' letter writing competence,especially in content,organization than the writing teaching approach in the control class.Besides,students' genre awareness has improved and their attitudes towards writing become positive.Therefore,the genre approach is worth applying in high school students writing teaching in the future.