Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1Research background
English Writing is a branch of rhetoric in western world, and it developed into acurriculum in 1963 (Cai, 2006). Before 1970s, the research of English writing wasmainly about the rhetoric part. By analyzing the model text, the writing rules wereformed. Ding (1995) claims that the resources of western writing theories are fromclassical rhetoric. Qi (2000) also points out that the basis of English writing theoriesare from western rhetoric. In China, the research about English writing theories andempirical studies are unsystematic and incomplete (Cai, 2000). There are largequantities of essays about L2 writing theories. But there is no doubt that there aremany problems existing in L2 writing. In China, the main research methods in L2writing are product approach, process approach and genre approach.Product approach focuses on the lexicons, sentence patterns and cohesive devices(Pincas,1982). Product approach emphasizes students’ imitating and consolidations.It’s easy for teacher to apply product approach into classroom teaching. But productapproach doesn’t agree with the students-centered teaching concepts. Students’initiative and creativity are restrained in that classroom.Process approach came into being in 1970s. Process approach emphasizes on thepre-writing preparation, students’ cooperation and peer review. The main focus is notthe final drafts but the writing process (Wang, 2006). Process approach is thestudents-centered, and emphasize on students’ problem-solving abilities and writingstrategies. While process approach ignores the teaching of language knowledge,students often feel unconfident owing to lack of the relevant language knowledge.Genre approach became very popular in America and Australia in recent tenyears(Qin ,2000). It applies the genre and genre analysis theories into classroomteaching. Genre approach focuses on the genre structures, the analysis of languagefeatures and the imitating. While it pay little attention to the developing of writingskills. The lack of students’ participation, the lack of creation and the simple imitationof the modeling text make the classroom inactive.
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1.2Purpose and significance of the study
English writing has gained lots of attention during recent years. A lot of scholarsand researchers have done many empirical studies in helping to find a more useful andeffective way to improve second language (L2) writing teaching. It has been provedthat different L2 writing teaching methods are complementary to and combined witheach other and then applied into the practical SL writing teaching environment.Process genre approach is an effective way in improving students’ writing. Itregards writing as a kind of social communication and focuses on the writing process.What’s more, the class is student-centered and it emphasizes peer review andrevisions. But the current studies in L2 writing are mainly about middle schoolstudents and college students. There is no concrete research on the postgraduates’English writing abilities and the effect of process genre approach in such context.Based on those researches, the author tried to find out the effect of process genreapproach on postgraduates’ English writing, and put forward the model of implementin the teaching process.Therefore, to further investigate the effectiveness of process genre approach onpostgraduates’ English writing, this thesis would make a complete analysis of thetheoretical basis and the research data. Based on this study, teachers can betterunderstand the current postgraduates’ writing difficulties. This research could helpbetter apply the process genre approach into writing class. So it may offer someimplications in the EFL writing instructions.
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Chapter 2 Literature review
2.1 A conceptual overview of English writing approaches
Hyland (2005) pides the research and teaching writing approaches into threemain kinds. Each of them concerns texts, writers or readers respectively. Text-oriented approach views writing as different kinds of texts, which areregarded to be textual products produced by writers. This view focuses on the writers’linguistic or rhetorical resources. Text-oriented approach theories could be pidedinto two parts: text as autonomous objects and texts as discourse.According to structuralism, the basic premise of text-oriented approach is thattexts should be analyzed and described independently of particular contexts, writers,or readers when those texts are considered to be autonomous objects. Texts havestructures, in which the words, clauses and sentences are arranged by grammarprinciples in order. The ideas embedded in the texts convey the same meanings byusing the same correct language forms. Only the surface structure of a text is the same,the meaning conveyed by the structure is also the same (Hyland, 2005). As to ‘Text asDiscourse’ , discourse here refers to language in use. It focuses on language functionsand purposes in pragmatics. The linguistic patterns imply a range of social constraintsand choices. The writers have some relationship with their readers and intend toconvey certain information to those readers.
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2.2 Genre and process genre approach
First, the nature of genre includes both social and cognitive aspects. The NewRhetoric school put forward that genres are located not in specific texts but instead, associo-cognitive schema for appropriate textual approaches to rhetorical problems(Grabe & Kaplan 1996; Bazerman 1998). According to Bhatia (2004), differentdemands of specific contexts, schemas usually need to be reconstructed. Second,genres are purposeful or responsive. It is generally acknowledged that the purpose ofwriters is very essential to genre theory. Third, genres are named by those in power.From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), this kind of naming isdetermined by the writers’ purposes.It is crucial to make a distinction between two types of naming of genre. The firstnaming of genre is for the pedagogical purposes. And the second is the actual namingby communities who have power over names in specific situations. Bhatia(2004)makes a distinction between the two kinds of naming. He refers to pedagogical genre,such as ‘description’, ‘narration’ and ‘instruction’ as ‘rhetorical or generic values’.And the actual community-related genres, such as ‘job application’ or ‘book reviews’are based on the common pedagogical naming (see Figure 1, adapted from Bhatia2004:59).
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Chapter 3 Research Methodology ....14
3.1 Research Questions.........14
3.2 Subjects ...........14
3.3 Instruments......15
3.4 Data collection procedure .......17
3.5 Data Analysis ..........18
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion ....20
4.1 Comparisons in writing proficiencies between pretest and posttest.....20
4.2 The Relationship among the Four Sub-categories ..........24
4.3 Discussion on Questionnaires .........36
Chapter 5 Conclusion ........42
5.1 Findings...........42
5.2 Limitations and Suggestions ...........44
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion
4.1 Comparisons in writing proficiencies between pretest and posttest.
As to the first research question “Is there any difference in general writingproficiency of postgraduates after 12-week training? If so, in what way? ” the authorwould give the analysis from the choice of different genres and some representativeexamples among the three writing drafts which show students’ writing proficiency.And then the correlative analysis of the three writing drafts and the scores offinal-term test were presented at the end of this part. But the qualities ofthose writing drafts were relatively poor. Most of the students didn’t understand howto write a good narration or exposition. Some structures of their writing drafts were indisorder. Otherwise some students didn’t express any ideas connected to the video clip“Black Hole” when they wrote an exposition, and they just showed their directfeelings and some simple ideas about “greed”; or there was no any expansion on thistopic or any implications from the video clip. What they wrote in their draft 1 wasalso lack of some necessary descriptions and some supporting sentences. As was thesame with the exposition writing drafts, the narrations also showed us someinformation of students’ poor writing abilities. Some students couldn’t catch the rightplot clue, or they didn’t know how to choose the proper verb tense when they wrote anarration. According to the statistics, there were 22 students ( 68.75%) using thewrong tense in their writing draft 1. Some students used the simple present tense orthe present progressive tense to describe the story rather than the simple past tense.
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Conclusion
Research findings show that process genre approach had created a great impactin improving students’ genre awareness and their writing abilities. Actually, mostpostgraduate students made great progress from all the four sub-categories (content,organization, language and fluency). They expressed their positive attitudes towardswriting and the process genre approach in their posttest questionnaires. Although asmall percentage students showed their uncertainty or negative responses towardswriting and this approach, which did not affect much to the result of the study.Process genre approach is very effective to improving students’ writing ability.Furthermore, students’ writing interests had been stimulated by this teaching approach,and they became more active in class. The explanations of the success of the processgenre approach could be interpreted from the following aspects:Firstly during the learning process, students could get rich input from classroomteaching with the “process genre approach”. Not only students could get input fromtheir teacher, but also they can gain help from their classmates. Students become moreactive in classroom activities. The teacher gives instructions and students do the peerreview and make discussions. Through Students’ active participation, they could helpeach other discover new ideas, organize structures and make other suggestions, suchas, revising the grammar mistakes and so on. In addition, the model text which isshared in the class can provide a framework of a genre, which could facilitatestudents’ writing inspirations. Students could also imitate the textual structures andlanguage features in model text. As Krashen(1982) argues, “a necessary (but notsufficient ) condition to move from stage ‘i’ to stage ‘i+1’ is that the acquirerunderstand input that contains ‘i+1’,where ‘understand’ means that the acquirer isfocused on the meaning and not the form of the message”. Therefore, if learners getrich information input, or if they have ideas in their mind and want to express, theycould be ready to produce a suitable structure in their writing drafts.
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References (omitted)