An Empirical Study Of Genre-based Teaching Of Oral English Narrative For Senior High School Students

As the curriculum reform has been further deepened,English teachers pay more attention to the cultivation of communicative competence.Oral English teaching increasingly shows its importance.The new curriculum reform has put forward higher requirements for senior high school English teaching.Teachers need to break the traditional teaching methods,stimulate students’ interest in oral English learning and improve their English oral ability.As we all know,oral English teaching is one of the most challenging parts of English language teaching.The traditional 3P approach is a kind of model which is mainly based on the teacher’s explanation,students’ practice,and production.In this model,teachers pay attention to the accuracy of language form but often ignore the text’s social context and communicative function.Therefore,the traditional method leads to the lack of communication in students’ oral production.From the perspective of communicative function,the genre-based approach focuses on the cultivation of students’ genre awareness.It trains students to give expression with the help of appropriate language forms according to genre structure,communicative purpose,and situational context.Based on the theory of systemic functional linguistics,the Australian school proposed a genre-based English teaching approach,which can be divided into three stages: modeling,joint construction,and independent construction.In this study,the genre-based approach was used to train students’ English oral narrative production,which is a typical genre in textbooks and life.A 14 weeks’ oral teaching experiment was conducted.The participants are two parallel classes in grade one of a senior high school,one is the experimental class,and the other is the control class,with 30 students in each class.The teacher taught the students English oral narrative through two classes’ hours each week.In the experimental class,the genrebased approach was adopted.In the control class,the traditional 3P approach was adopted.The research tools include oral pre-test and post-test,recording and transcribing the two oral tests.It mainly attempts to answer the following questions:(1)Can students’ grades be enhanced in English oral tests through the genre-based approach compared with the control group?(2)Do the two groups differ in language development,namely,oral complexity,oral accuracy,and oral fluency?The experimental data have oral grades,the results of oral fluency,accuracy,and complexity.The grades of students’ oral tests were scored by two teachers,and the final scores were calculated by averaging.The results of this study are as follows:(1)There is a significant difference in the oral grades between the experimental class and the control class in the post-test(P =.001).The experimental class’ s oral grade is significantly higher than that of the control class,which is reflected in the improvement of discourse structure and content expression integrity(P =.001).Compared with the traditional 3P approach,the genre-based approach is more helpful to improve learners’ oral English level.(2)For the influence of fluency,accuracy,and complexity,the genre-based approach is superior to the traditional 3P approach in fluency.The oral fluency of the experimental class is significantly improved,including the mean length of pause time(P =.001)and speech rate(P =.039).The implications of this study on English language teaching are reflected in the following aspects: First,oral teaching should pay more attention to the cultivation of students’ genre awareness.Teachers should consciously use genre to help students construct output to achieve the communicative goal in the teaching process.Second,the positive effect of the genre-based approach on narrative oral teaching means that teachers can use this method to teach other genres in senior high school.Finally,it is helpful for language teachers to combine input and output tasks in the genre-based approach.