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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background and Significance of the Study
At present, English is regarded as “Global Language” (Nunan,2001) in internationalcommunication. It is learned and taught all over the civilized world. The fundamental skillssuch as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation are indispensable to each other inEnglish learning. Among the five skills, writing is considered to be the most difficult one. Lotsof researchers hold that writing can reflect not only students’ mastery of vocabulary andgrammar, but also students’ ability to organize, analyze, express, and reason logically.However, the teaching of writing has not been given its deserved attention and has always beenthe weak point of college English teaching in China. Many English teachers have realized thatwriting skill seems to be more difficult and necessary to acquire than the other four skills. Asclaimed by the National College English Test Committee that the average scores of writing inPET-3 is 4-5 all over the country which is much below the passing level (Liu,1998;Jia,1998).Based on this, teachers have realized gradually that it is necessary to improve college students’English writing proficiency and finding a valid teaching approach.Over the past several decades, the study of writing instruction has become part of themainstream of applied linguistics. Research in EFL writing has gone through a history of about50 years. Drawing on such theories as cognitive psychology, textual analysis and appliedlinguistics, three approaches----product approach, process approach and genre approach havebeen set up. However, there are respective strengths and weaknesses of each approach in theprocess of teaching. Many researchers have tried to exert the strengths and overcome theweaknesses, it is illustrated that Escholz(1980)once tried to combine the strengths of theproduct approach with the process approach and Paltridge(1996)also attempted to reconcile theprocess approach with the genre approach. Whereas Badger and White(2000) put forward theprocess-genre approach to EFL writing teaching by integrating the three approaches. Theprocess-genre approach focuses on a particular genre of writing at first. After that, the studentsproduce some compositions in accord with their own needs which are supported by teacher,their peers and model texts. By far, it is considered that this approach has been the mosteffective one to teaching writing.Nevertheless, the theoretical basis of the process-genre approach has not been explicitlyexpounded by far. Particularly in China, few people have got knowledge of the approach, not tomention its application in EFL teaching. What’s more, the specific teaching procedures thatteachers can operate directly in vocational college writing class have not been representedclearly. While the existing teaching procedures and suggestions about this approach broughtforward by some researchers (Han Jinlong,2001;Wang Hongguang,2002) are not detailedenough.

1.2 The Structure of the thesis
In the thesis, process-genre approach is employed in an experiment. The study is based onwriting tests, questionnaire, class observation and interviews and focus on the application ofprocess-genre approach, in addition, tries to determine to what extent the process-genreapproach will improve the writing proficiency of vocational college’s students.This thesis is composed of 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。