The application of genre-Based approach in teaching writing skill at Tran Mai Ninh secondary school

The application of genre Based approach in teaching writing skill at Tran Mai Ninh secondary school THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING CENTER OF THANH HOA CITY INITIATIVE THE APPLICATION OF GENRE BASED APPROACH IN TEACHING WRITING SKILL AT TRAN MAI NINH SECONDARY SCHOOL Writer Phạm Thị Hồng Vân Position Teacher School Tran Mai Ninh Secondary school, Thanh Hoa city Subject English SangKienKinhNghiem net 1 THANH HOA YEAR 2017 SangKienKinhNghiem net 2 TABLE CO[.]

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING CENTER

OF THANH HOA CITY

INITIATIVE

THE APPLICATION OF GENRE-BASED

APPROACH

IN TEACHING WRITING SKILL

AT TRAN MAI NINH SECONDARY SCHOOL

Writer: Phạm Thị Hồng Vân

Position: Teacher

School: Tran Mai Ninh Secondary school, Thanh Hoa city Subject : English

THANH HOA YEAR 2017

TABLE CONTENT

Trang

2.3 Solutions and methods for implementation 7

2.3.2 The tasks, objects and time for research 8

2.3.4 Some demonstrations for research 10

1.INTRODUCTION 1.1 REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC.

For such a long time, writing, together with reading, has always been put priority The product approach, the process approach and sometimes the product-process approach towards writing have been implemented in Tran Mai Ninh Secondary School where I am currently working as well as in many other secondary schools in Vietnam However, most students find writing struggling, and many of them don’t meet the writing requirements Moreover, many students in Vietnam cannot make distinction between different kinds of texts This may result from traditional teaching method which focus on grammar, and writing is sometimes taught at sentence level The genre-based approach towards teaching writing, in fact, has been implemented in many other countries for the last few decades; however, it is still new to Vietnamese teachers I find genre-approach really interesting and I am really interested in trying out the new teaching approach to writing with the hope that I will help my students improve their writing skill

The motivation behind this research proposal comes from the researcher’s personal observations new approach to teaching writing she has learnt during a course on Professional Development for Vietnamese teacher trainers in RELC, Singapore

The goal of this study is to examine whether genre-base approach to writing instruction would help improve the quality of students’ writing and overcome their writing difficulties The recount genre is chosen to keep the instruction relevant to the grade ten and eleven students who were the subject of the study

The research proposal focus only on the effectiveness of genre approach

to teaching recount writing, and it designed to investigate the following questions:

1 What is the quality of my students’ recounts?

2 What problems do my students encounter when they write recounts

3 Does using genre-based approach help improve the quality of my students’ writing when they write recounts?

As a teacher of English at high school, I myself always desire to find out and apply the new methods of teaching in order to meet the educational goal From

my own experiences, I finds this area important for further research because if the study proves the successful of genre-based approach in teaching recount writing, it will be a basic to investigate the effectiveness of this new approach towards teaching writing and other skills This project seeks to investigate the effectiveness of the genre-based approach on teaching recount writing for students in grade 6th and 9th at Tran Mai Ninh secondary School, Thanh Hoa province, Viet Nam The findings in this study are mainly based on data collected from students’ writing samples before and after teaching sessions The writing samples will be analyzed based on raters’ checklists and then compare with the holistic analysis done on five sample compositions

* Survey results before applying genre-based approach in writing

8A

( 40 students)

2 students = 5%

6 students = 15%

22 students = 55%

10 students = 25%

1.2 AIMS OF THE RESEARCH

To introduce how to apply the genre-based approach in teaching writing at high school

- To introduce the advantages of the application of genre-based approach in teaching writing

- To explore the effectiveness of the genre-based approach to teaching recount

Writing

- To assess the quality of students’ writing as well as finding out the problems they encounter when they write recounts and most importantly, the effect of the genre-based approach on the overall performance of students when they write recount texts

- To make easier for students to produce acceptable structures in their writing tasks Therefore, an assigned genre seems to serve as an influential tool for both the learning and teaching of writing (for both

students and teachers)

To encourages students to participate in the world around them, to comprehend writing as a tool that they can utilize, and to realize how writers manage content to promote logical organization It also allows students to become more flexible in their thinking and eventually to realize how authors organize their writings

1.3 SCOPE AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

*Scope: Researching in the process of teaching English at Luong Dac

Bang High school

* Research methodology: making survey, reading reference books,

applying in teaching, observing and drawing out experiences

2 MAIN CONTENT 2.1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.1.1 The definitions of genre

As this lesson focuses on the genre-based approach, it’s necessary to

understand the concept of “genre” What is genre? For Callaghan and Rothery,

“genre is the way people make meaning with one another in stages to achieve their purposes.” (1993:35) Genre has the special characteristics as follow:

 It is culture specific, and it develops and changes along with the culture

 It is goal-oriented

 It has distinctive stages: beginning, middle and end

 It contains particular linguistic features

According to David Butt et al (1995), genre, which relates to the purpose of the text, is one of the contexts of a text The other context is register, which is made up of three variables: field, tenor and mode Field refers to what is talked about or written about It can be something that happened, is happening or will happen Tenor is the relationship between the writer and the reader or between the speaker and the listener Mode is the channel of communication, the kind of text that is being made to convey a message

“Genre” refers not only to types of literary texts but also to the predictable and recurring patterns of everyday, academic and literary texts occurring within

a particular culture (Hammond and Derewianka, 2001) In the western countries,

genre, either spoken or written, is often identified/grouped according to its primary social purposes According to Swale (1990) the genres which share the same purposes belong to the same text-types Derewianka (1990) identified further six main genres according to their primary social purposes:

+ Narratives: tell a story, usually to entertain

+ Recount: to tell what happened

+ Information reports: provide factual information

+ Instruction: tell the listeners or readers what to do

+ Explanation: explain why or how something happens

+ Expository texts: present or argue a viewpoint

+ Procedure: give instructions how to do/ make something

These social purposes of the text-genres in turn decide the linguistic inputs of the text (i.e their linguistic conventions, often in form of schematic structure and linguistic features) Specifically, schematic structure refers to internal structure or text organization of the text-type in forms of introduction, body and conclusion, while language features consist of linguistic aspects such

as grammar, vocabulary, connectors, etc that the writers have to use in order to translate information/ideas into a readable text

2.1.2 Genre-based approach

The genre-based approach to teaching writing is often referred to the Curriculum Genre or Curriculum Cycle According to Hyon, “genre-based pedagogy, in all form, involves some kinds of classroom consideration of genres and the contexts in which they are found.” (1996: 697) In “Exploiting How Texts Works” (1990) Beverly Derewianka described the curriculum cycle, which includes four stages:

Stage 1.Building the Field: This gives the students time to gather information

about what they will be writing Teacher can introduce the text type by discussing the words connected to the text type, planning some activities to familiarize the students with the subject matter and the text type and locating sample texts for immersion and modeling This stage, such activities are listening, speaking, reading, information gathering, note taking, and field trips can be organized This stage ties in perfectly with Units of Inquiry The students

are already familiar with Unit, the concepts, and the vocabulary.

Stage 2 Modeling the Text Type: This stage aims at preparing students for

the next stage Teacher explicitly introduces a model that is similar to the one to

be written later as a joint construction by the class The teacher may get students

to discuss the purposes for the use of this text in the society/daily lives Students have the chance to become familiar with the purpose, overall structure of the text, and linguistic features of the text type they are going to write

Stage 3 Joint Construction: Before students write independent texts, it

would be useful for them to participate in group writing A text may be jointly constructed by the whole class, a group of students or the teacher and the students write a text together, considering both the content and the language

Stage 4 Independence Writing: Students write on their own texts on a

related topic based on which had been given or discussed Each student chooses his/her own topic and writes drafts, referring to the models Then, the students consult with the teacher or their peers and receive their comments Editing and publishing are the final steps

2.2 PRACTICAL BACKGROUND

Writing skill is seemed to be difficult for all students in learning foreign language at high school According to me, the difficulties include those in generating and organizing ideas using an appropriate choice of vocabulary and putting such ideas into an intelligible text

For my students, besides these difficulties, they also have to face many other obstacles when learning to write compositions in English.The first difficulty rests in the fact that English in Vietnamese secondary schools nowadays is treated primarily as a compulsory subject for studying and for exam-driven purposes rather than as a tool for communication Students have been asked to do the multiple choice tests on their final exams, which include several sections on grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing In the writing section, students are asked to “rewrite” some sentences in another way but keep exactly the same meaning as the given ones They are also asked

to repair word order in jumbled-word sentences or fill in the blanks with the suitable verbs or verbal phrases As passing exams is vital for students’ lives,

most of the time in class, a large number of teachers may be in more favor of teaching such writing skills to help their students pass the exams

Secondly, the “so-called” teaching writing approach of composition deployed by teachers at present may expose some difficulties for students in the performance of the compositional writing skills In terms of teaching English paragraphs, most of the teachers just focus on providing their student writers with vocabulary relating to the required topic and some guiding questions in order to help them shape their ideas into the completed paragraphs Teaching writing in this way only benefits them to an extent that it can assist them in producing the error-free texts following the models of correct language

In addition, there was a tendency among Engish teachers in secondary schools to ignore teaching writing Teachers provided students with less opportunity to practice writing English In other word, the English teachers in general were more concentrate on teaching skills such as reading and listening , and language components such as vocabulary and grammar

In short, writing classes at secodary school nowadays are still predominantly language-based writing classes that focus on sentence writing for sentence building tests, rather than focusing on creating paragraphs to serve the purpose of plurality of real readers outside the classroom context

2.3 SOLUTIONS AND METHODS FOR IMPLEMENTATION

2.3.1 SOLUTIONS

- Teacher should know the both advantages and disadvantages of the application

of genre-based approach in teaching writing English as well as solutions to their problems

- In order to apply the genre-based approach in teaching writing, teacher will need to do the following steps:

1 Planning

2 Drawing up a syllabus

3 Selecting material

4 Preparing activities

5 Evaluating the teaching

- Teacher should minimize the difficulties in teaching writing, the exercise of

writing is not directly writing paragraph or composing the text It can be started

by writing sentences Students should be able to construct the sentences, overcome problem with sentence and write connected sentences

- After the students have the ability to construct the sentences, the writing exercise is increased by giving experience to the students to write paragraph, the text or the whole text This activity will have students to become independent writers

- Teacher should be interested in teaching writing, because their suggestion instead that paying attention to what students say will show an improvement in writing

2.3.2 METHODS FOR IMPLEMENTATION

DATA COLLECTION PLAN

a Participants: Fifty five students of Class 8A at Tran Mai Ninh Secondary

School, Thanh Hoa city were invited to take part in an experimental writing class in which I used the genre-based approach in teaching writing English in order to teach the student (participants) to write on the recount text This extracurricular writing activity was conducted outside their regular class hours

in order to offer the student participants a lot of opportunities to practice more in the writing skills I saved time because I took the existing recount writing samples of the students to analyze

b Methodology

The researcher intends to use qualitative method to analyze students’ writing samples before and after the teaching sessions in two different ways

- The first way is to use rater’s checklist (see appendix 1) A rater’ checklist that highlights the features to be assessed is devised by the researcher It is taken from a page from Oxford University Press The students’ writing samples will

be collected and given to two raters for assessment Neither of them knew which sample are the existing writing samples and which ones are collected after the teaching sessions Both of them are high school teachers who are familiar with the marking scheme for writing

- The second way is to use holistic rating of writing samples (see appendix 2) This holistic assessment is based on the recount rubric of Department of