Which Writing Approach Should I Use in My Teaching?
1. Introduction
Communication plays a significant role in the Globalization Age. English teaching shifted the focus from the grammatical knowledge to communication. In the past decades, English teaching in China has achieved great improvement. However the promotion in the teaching of English writing is not obvious. Chinese students’ IELTS scores in writing have been the lowest one in the four skills according to the research data analysis on the official website of IELTS examination. (
http://www.ielts.org/researchers/ ) Chinese students are sick of English writing. Teaching writing is considered as the most challenging job among the four skills. We have experienced different teaching approaches in writing from product approach to process approach and genre approach. Which approach should we use in your teaching? When I was in China, I had the confusion. I could not know how to solve the problem and it was hard to get the help from the experts and find the relevant books in my hometown. Now I am studying MA TESOL in UK. I can learn with the most excellent linguists and read the relevant books in the libraries. It is time to reconsider these questions to solve the confusion in my mind. Thus this essay aims at reexamining the three writing approaches and exploring an appropriate teaching approach in writing in my teaching context through analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Before I start my discussion, it is necessary for me to introduce my teaching context and my students’ main problem in writing. Then I will briefly review the three approaches —Product Approach, Process Approach and Genre Approach in literature. After that, I will compare the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in order to find the approach I need. At last I will state my solution. I hope my essay could be helpful for the other EFL teachers in China to get a better understanding of the three approaches and to choose their teaching approach in writing.
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