The application of genre based approach in teaching writing skill at tran mai ninh secondary school

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAININGTHE EDUCATION AND TRAINING CENTER OF THANH HOA CITY INITIATIVE THE APPLICATION OF GENRE-BASED APPROACH IN TEACHING WRITING SKILL AT TRAN MAI

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

Tran g

2.3.2 The tasks, objects and time for research 8

1.INTRODUCTION 1.1 REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC.

For such a long time, writing, together with reading, has always been putpriority The product approach, the process approach and sometimes theproduct-process approach towards writing have been implemented in Tran MaiNinh Secondary School where I am currently working as well as in many othersecondary schools in Vietnam However, most students find writing struggling,and many of them don’t meet the writing requirements Moreover, manystudents in Vietnam cannot make distinction between different kinds of texts.This may result from traditional teaching method which focus on grammar, andwriting is sometimes taught at sentence level The genre-based approach towardsteaching writing, in fact, has been implemented in many other countries for thelast 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 newteaching approach to writing with the hope that I will help my students improvetheir writing skill

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

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

The research proposal focus only on the effectiveness of genre approach

to teaching recount writing, and it designed to investigate the followingquestions:

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 andapply 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 ifthe study proves the successful of genre-based approach in teaching recountwriting, it will be a basic to investigate the effectiveness of this new approachtowards teaching writing and other skills This project seeks to investigate theeffectiveness of the genre-based approach on teaching recount writing forstudents in grade 6th and 9th at Tran Mai Ninh secondary School, Thanh Hoaprovince, Viet Nam The findings in this study are mainly based on datacollected from students’ writing samples before and after teaching sessions Thewriting samples will be analyzed based on raters’ checklists and then comparewith the holistic analysis done on five sample compositions

* Survey results before applying genre-based approach in writing

8A 2 students = 6 students = 22 students = 10 students =

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 inteaching 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 theproblems they encounter when they write recounts and most importantly,the effect of the genre-based approach on the overall performance ofstudents when they write recount texts

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

students and teachers)

To encourages students to participate in the world around them, tocomprehend writing as a tool that they can utilize, and to realize howwriters manage content to promote logical organization It also allowsstudents to become more flexible in their thinking and eventually torealize 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 achievetheir 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 ofthe text, is one of the contexts of a text The other context is register, which ismade up of three variables: field, tenor and mode Field refers to what is talkedabout or written about It can be something that happened, is happening or willhappen Tenor is the relationship between the writer and the reader or betweenthe speaker and the listener Mode is the channel of communication, the kind oftext that is being made to convey a message

“Genre” refers not only to types of literary texts but also to the predictableand 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 itsprimary social purposes According to Swale (1990) the genres which share thesame purposes belong to the same text-types Derewianka (1990) identifiedfurther 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 linguisticinputs of the text (i.e their linguistic conventions, often in form of schematicstructure and linguistic features) Specifically, schematic structure refers tointernal 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 totranslate information/ideas into a readable text

2.1.2 Genre-based approach

The genre-based approach to teaching writing is often referred to theCurriculum Genre or Curriculum Cycle According to Hyon, “genre-basedpedagogy, in all form, involves some kinds of classroom consideration of genresand the contexts in which they are found.” (1996: 697) In “Exploiting HowTexts 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 tofamiliarize the students with the subject matter and the text type and locatingsample texts for immersion and modeling This stage, such activities arelistening, speaking, reading, information gathering, note taking, and field tripscan 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 Studentshave the chance to become familiar with the purpose, overall structure of thetext, 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 jointlyconstructed by the whole class, a group of students or the teacher and thestudents 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 chooseshis/her own topic and writes drafts, referring to the models Then, the studentsconsult with the teacher or their peers and receive their comments Editing andpublishing are the final steps

2.2 PRACTICAL BACKGROUND

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

For my students, besides these difficulties, they also have to face manyother obstacles when learning to write compositions in English.The firstdifficulty rests in the fact that English in Vietnamese secondary schoolsnowadays is treated primarily as a compulsory subject for studying and forexam-driven purposes rather than as a tool for communication Students havebeen asked to do the multiple choice tests on their final exams, which includeseveral sections on grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing Inthe writing section, students are asked to “rewrite” some sentences in anotherway 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 thesuitable 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 ofteaching such writing skills to help their students pass the exams.

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

In addition, there was a tendency among Engish teachers in secondaryschools to ignore teaching writing Teachers provided students with lessopportunity to practice writing English In other word, the English teachers ingeneral 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 stillpredominantly language-based writing classes that focus on sentence writing forsentence building tests, rather than focusing on creating paragraphs to serve thepurpose 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 theirproblems

- 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 writingexercise is increased by giving experience to the students to write paragraph, thetext or the whole text This activity will have students to become independentwriters

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

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 writingclass in which I used the genre-based approach in teaching writing English inorder to teach the student (participants) to write on the recount text Thisextracurricular writing activity was conducted outside their regular class hours

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

be collected and given to two raters for assessment Neither of them knew whichsample are the existing writing samples and which ones are collected after theteaching sessions Both of them are high school teachers who are familiar withthe 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

Education and Children’s Service, Government of South Australia In this waysthe writing samples of students will be assessed based on three main categories:

structure, grammar and writing features, and they will be classified as weak, average, good or very good depending on how they meet the demand of the

criteria

c Data collection procedure

Prior to the teaching sessions using genre-based approach to teaching, I

will collect five existing writing samples of five grade ten students at random

I intend to teach students on recount writing based on genre approach in four lessons Four ninety-minute lessons will be taught during the treatment period, probably starting in February, 2015 The students were taught at sometime outside their normal curriculum time The lessons are planned to progress in this order:

Lesson 1: Building knowledge of the field

Lesson 2: Modeling the text

Lesson 3: Joint construction

Lesson 4: Independent construction

After the teaching treatment, I asked students to write a recount, and then Icollected five writing samples from the same students whose writings werecollected previously

The writing samples was assessed by the two raters and I based on the rater’schecklist and the holistic assessment table

2.3.3 Data analysis

I planned to analyze the data in order to answer the three 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?

When the raters finished their checklist, if the results were too different, theresearcher would ask the two raters to work together to compare and make thefinal decision I intended to answer the questions based on both the results of therater’s checklists and the holistic assessment

Based on the checklists and the holistic assessment on the students existingwriting samples, I found the answers for the first and second questions I wouldassess the quality of each student’s recounts before teaching sessions as well asthe general quality of all the student’s recounts.

The same thing is done with the writing samples collected after the teachingsessions, and based on that, I would assess the quality of each student’s recountsafter teaching sessions as well as the general quality of all the student’s recounts

2.3.4 Some demonstrations for the application of genre-based approach in teaching writing English.

Model 1: a sample for writing a paragraph.

SKILLS 2 ( Part: Writing ) PERIOD: 76

A OBJECTIVES: By the end of the lesson, Ss can:

- Listen for general and specific information about natural disaster in a news report.

- Write a new report on natural disaster.

B AIDS : Posters, pictures

C. TEACHING AIDS: TV programmes, textbook, hand outs, pictures…

D. PROCEDURE:

Teacher’s Activities Student’s Activities Stage 1: Building the field

- Work in groups

Activity 1: Show some pictures of natural disasters. - Look at pictures and

answer the questions

- - Ask students to answer

- Lead in the advantages and disadvantages of the