An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of The Process Genre Approach On Junior High School Students' English Writing

According to the English curriculum in 2017,it is required that English teachers should pay close attention to improve students' ability of thinking and expressing in English.As one of the most important means of thinking,English writing can train students' ability of organization and expression in language.And in the middle school entrance examination,writing occupies a large part.Writing is considered as a kind of task that can fully test the comprehensive ability of students.However,in current English teaching in China,many front-line teachers are pursuing superficial efficiency and neglecting the improvement of students' comprehensive ability.How to effectively teach English writing so as to enhance students' comprehensive ability and interest in writing is a dilemma faced by many English teachers in China now.The reform of English writing teaching has been carried out by many researchers all the time,such as Badger and White(2000).They put forward the Process Genre Approach(PGA)after sorting out the three most frequently used writing teaching approaches,which are results approach,the genre approach and the process approach.The application of the PGA in writing teaching can broaden students' language knowledge,contextual knowledge and writing skills,and it is conducive to improving students' writing ability comprehensively and cultivating students' good English writing habits.Based on the theories of constructivist learning theory and output hypothesis and in line with the PGA,this thesis designs,implements andanalyses an English teaching writing experiment.This thesis uses SPSS.21 to analyze the data and to study the influence of PGA on junior high school students' English writing.The thesis mainly explores the following two questions:(1)What are the effects of Process Genre Approach on junior high school students' English writing application strategies?(2)What are the effects of Process Genre Approach on junior high school students' English writing competence?The participants in this experiment are from a public junior high school where the researcher works.The teaching approach that is adopted by the experimental class(EC)is the Process Genre Approach.Teacher in the EC uses PGA to teach English writing,while the students in the control class(CC)were still taught to write according to the traditional teaching approach.Two questionnaires are conducted to test whether the experimental class' s writing strategy application ability has been improved;a pre-test of English writing is carried out to test whether the writing competence of the two classes is parallel so as to ensure the reliability and validity of the experiment;and a comparison of the results between the pre-test and the post-test is used to test whether the PGA could effectively improve the students' writing competence.The following findings are found:(1)Compared with the students before the experiment,the students in the EC can use writing application strategies in a higher frequency.(2)Compared with the pre-experiment,the students' English writing performance in the EC has been significantly improved;compared with the CC,the students' English writing performance in theEC has been improved more significantly.This study testifies that the PGA is a bit more effective to the improvement of junior high school students' English writing strategies and writing competence.And this thesis provides a referential writing teaching model for junior high school English writing teaching.However,there are also some shortcomings of the experiment and the result,such as the short experimental time(3 months),limited samples(80 students)and insufficient persuasion of the result.