Empirical Research On The Effects Of Genre-based English Reading Teaching On Senior High School Students' Thinking Qualities

The High School English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 edition)lists thinking quality as one of the key competences and emphasizes the importance of thinking-oriented English reading teaching.Since the curriculum reform,senior high school English reading teaching has made some progress.However,the teaching contents still focus on the literal meaning of the text and the teaching activities are mainly information extraction exercises.This teaching approach does not make use of the genre information of the text to cultivate students' thinking qualities like analyzing,inferring,evaluating,etc.Genre-based teaching approach provides a new perspective and theoretical basis for reading instruction.Genre is regarded as a kind of communicative events.The author uses specific text structure and language expression based on different communicative purposes and objects.Accordingly,genre-based reading teaching is to view reading as a communicative process based on the genre analysis of the text.Different types of texts have different communicative purposes and text structures.On the basis of genre analysis of the model texts,including the analysis of writing purposes,discourse organization and main idea,students can flexibly use these reading strategies to carry out analytical,inferential and critical reading activities according to the genre of the text and required reading tasks.Thus,this approach will be beneficial to training students' using metacognitive reading strategies and English thinking qualities.This research applies genre-based teaching approach to senior high school English reading teaching,aiming to answering the following questions: 1)How does genrebased English reading teaching affect senior high school students' analyzing qualities? 2)How does genre-based English reading teaching affect senior high school students' inferring qualities? 3)How does genre-based English reading teaching affect senior high school students' evaluating qualities?In order to answer the above questions,this research selects two parallel classes of a four-star senior high school in Nanjing,totally 99 senior 2 students as the research subjects.These two classes are divided into the experimental class and the control class,and the teaching experiment lasts for 12 weeks.In the experimental class,the genrebased reading teaching approach is applied,while the control class uses the conventional reading teaching approach.Before the experiment,the author conducts a questionnaire survey to all the students to be aware of the current situation of thinking qualities cultivation in senior high school English reading teaching,and a pre-test is followed.After the experiment,the author collects all the students' post-test results,and uses SPSS 23.0 to analyze the pre-test and post test data.Also,the interviews to the students in the control class are carried out,so as to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate the influences of the genre-based teaching approach on the thinking qualities of senior high school students.After the experiment,the author finds that: 1)Although genre-based reading teaching approach can improve students' analyzing qualities,the effect is not significant.This is because some teachers using the conventional reading teaching approach also attach the importance to grasping the main idea cultural context and situational context of the text.Hence,students in the control class also show progress in their analyzing qualities.However,compared with the genre-based teaching approach,traditional reading teaching still lacks systematic and comprehensive discourse analysis.2)Genrebased reading teaching approach can significantly improve students' inferring qualities,especially to medium-level students.They are more flexibly to infer the opinions and attitudes of the author and pay more attention to the wording to deduce the emotional meaning,especially through the conjunctions and adjectives.In addition,they are better at using genre analysis methods to take advantage of the theme and the structure of the text and so on to infer the author's writing purpose.3)Genre-based teaching approach can also significantly improve students' evaluating qualities.After the analysis of communicative purpose,discourse structure and language style of different discourse types,it focuses on the cultivation of students' abilities to evaluate these aspects critically both in oral or written form.Especially when learning argumentations,students pay attention to the breadth and depth of the evaluation.They can also learn some language expressions that state personal opinions and refute other's opinions,which further improves the accuracy and logic of the evaluation.Based on this research,the following conclusions can be drawn: 1)Reasonable use of genre-based reading teaching approach can improve students' thinking qualities.However,in order to better implement this approach,teachers need to first fully grasp the theories of it and build the genre-based reading teaching model and framework on account of promoting thinking qualities.2)During the application of genre-based reading teaching approach,teachers need to balance the relationship between it and the traditional reading teaching approach.The development of thinking qualities is inseparable from the accumulation of language,especially the form and meaning.The integration of multiple reading approaches can promote the overall and coordinated development of students' reading abilities and thinking qualities.