Genre Theory to Chinese English Reading Classes

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Hypothesis
Methodology of the Experiment Design
Other Studies
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction

For English teachers, the biggest challenge in front of them is difficulty in memorizing texts on part of many students. Almost all students whether they have English major or not as their subjects fail to remember the sentences, ideas theme or content leave alone describing in own words. If students’ remember at all they can only remember either little bit of theme or story line or certain phrases or sentences. There could never exist complete information in their mind. This kind of problem is called a discourse memory.

Obviously, students in possession of good memory would be able to remember more information and can better comprehend the same. In the whole process of listening and reading, students try to understand the content taking base the very knowledge and concept about which they are aware of and also about the speaker, the situation and about the place where the story or a piece of content is placed. In fact, in the reading and listening process, many details or some part of the details may be wiped out from the memory.

Here the application of Schemata of different course types as regard to the respective genre is considered as a very important concept. The activation of schemata during discourse comprehension influences on how much and what is recalled. Schemata is very helpful in retrieving the lost content from the memory and is very well understood and applied in context to the genre.

Main body

There are several kinds of genres like narration, exposition, description, and argumentation. This following paper will be developed on basis of the several conductors on the research about the system of EFL learning and the way they can be developed to make the students memorize the contents of the English genre. EFL Learning means English for specific purpose or ESP, in other words it is also known as the LSP. In other words, ESP is applied to the terms like need based, pragmatic, efficient, cost efficient and functional. (Hutchinson & Waters 1987) In other words, ESP could also mean accomodationist. Hereby, we will experiment and conduct how the research on ESP could be applied to the genre narration and how the research shows concept Schemeta could be applied to this.

There are various psychological factors that contribute to the English language difficulties among students. For my research I have taken the Non English majors in Chinese EFL reading classes of Grade 2. They are taking CET-4 Chinese English test exams. I have taken on experiment bases two natural classes: one on experimental base class and one control with the expected time span of 18 weeks.

As a result of the numerous studies, several strategies have been brought into focus to develop among students the skill of reading and memorizing. All these strategies are divided into two forms: Direct Strategies and Indirect strategies. (Oxford, 1990) In the direct strategy, the mental processing of the language is involved and there are three different types of groups of direct strategies and these are memory, cognitive and compensation strategies. Mental strategies are also called as Mnemomics and involve mental processes, which are used for arranging information in order like and in this is applied Schemetic theory.

In cognitive strategy, language is targeted to make the meaning clear to the students and compensation strategies allow the students to make their own analysis and guess the meanings. Indirect strategies develop the ways of learning by giving support and managing language learning directly involving the target language. There are three kinds of indirect strategies: The first one is metacognitive strategies which allow learners to make plans, coordinate the actions and make evaluations and give direction to the learners for self learning and also to check errors. Second is affective strategy, which helps learners to control over the emotions, attitudes and motivations and social strategies involve group learning or cooperation with each other.

Hypothesis

In this study, it has been tried to find out how the students have adopted the genre theory in context to the learning strategy and the schematic themes. In this context to make the Chinese students to frame the mental picture of the contents and memorize it, the approach towards Genre theory is the most novel way to make it the perception of schemas of recurrent communication events easy for us. The application of genre theory will be very effective to make easy for formulation of the EFL reading classes. First before applying the genre theory in context to the Chinese students EFL classes, there is a need to understand what constitutes the theory.

The word itself has been originated from the French but before that from Latin, and the meaning of the same is a kind or class. This word is used in the sphere of rhetoric, literature, media theory, and more lately linguistics, to mention about the different type of text. “Representation of a genre may then be regarded as making up a family whose septs and individual members are related in various ways, without necessarily having any single feature shared in common by law”. (Fowler, 1989, p. 1) It is literary genre that would be applied for ESP class.

Methodology of the Experiment Design

This hypothesis could be tested in the form of experiment design. For this purpose the kind of data needs to be collected is what kind of English mistakes students commit while reading and how they can make improvement regarding the same: the way they can concentrate if someone is reading and the way they can become better learner and thinker. After careful analysis of the diaries kept by some of students, it was found that they are aware of themselves as learners and often discuss and analyze the way and process involved in their learning.

For this purpose two methodologies were used, the first one was standardized test, the secondary level English proficiency test or SLEP (Educational testing services, 1991) and second was SILL (Strategy Inventory for language learning). (Oxford, 1990) SLEP test is to judge listening and reading and comprehension. The SLEP test is a sort of norm referenced proficiency test for the purpose of administering the methods to take measurements for the process of listening and reading of the comprehensions. It had total 100 multiple-choice questions, some around 7 to analyze and make judgments of each skill.

Whereas in the SILL instrument, there were 50 short statements and students were judged on the various aspects like their memory, cognitive skills and compensation and how effective they were? Each answer was judged on the basis of 5-point Likert scale system varying from 1 to 5. The students were divided into three levels of proficiency: high, medium and low. The results showed that low proficiency group has scoring between 27 and 40, medium proficiency group between 41 and 47, the high group between 48 and 62.

To test their listening comprehension skills, the tests were conducted on the various range of listening abilities and the students were accepted to give their answers to the questions, which were in the form of single sentences, short passages or conversations. For the reading comprehension, assessment was made on the basis of main and sub skills and questions were put in the form of literary and non-literary passages.

To analyze which strategy these students were adopting, questionnaire was prepared whereby every student was asked to answer its questions and it was found out that the metacognitive strategy had highest mean like M=3.53, followed by compensation M=3.45, cognitive M=3.26, affective M=3.15, social M=3.06, and in the last memory M=2.87. It was found that Chinese students were more using metacognitive strategy whereas memory strategy was very less used. Hereby it was found that students were spending more time in regulating and managing their learning than storing and recalling new information.

The most significant aspect that came to light from this study was the fact that students adopt very less of memorization strategies. This is quite contradictory to Chinese students, who adopt memorization concepts and strategies, however even though their tradition dictates and their attitude towards memorization is strong yet the findings brought forth the interesting aspect that students are making very little use of the special techniques or mnemonic devices to increase their memorization efforts.

Some of the techniques used in the questionnaire are formation of a mental picture of certain place or situation where the word can be used, use of the rhymes and remembering new words or phrases, but from their answers and careful analysis, it was found that students were not aware of these techniques.

After these studies, it was found that we needed to formulate genre theory in the form of narrative. It is a form where the story is narrated. Adopting of this genre would influence the readers for memorizing and applying schematic tendency. The term “schema” refers to “an active organization of past reactions, or past experience” (Hampson & Morris, 1995, p. 178). For Anderson, the word schema is based on the belief that “every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world as well” (Aebersold & Field, 1997:65).

There, readers could adopt a coherent interpretation of text through the interactive process of “combining textual information with the information a reader brings to text” (Grabe, 1988:56). Hereby one by one students would be called upon to narrate one story each. But before the reading process is started, they will be given the story to read on their own. After reading it, they will be told to first find out the difficult words and the meanings of the same, secondly they will be told the name of the writer of the story and why he or she has written the story. Thirdly they will be asked to make points of the important events of happenings in the story. With these points only they will learn what is the whole story about.

Next students will also be made to note down plot or theme of the story and summarize the same. After noting down they will be made to read the summary few times on their own or in their group and then one by one will be called on the stage to first read the story from the book and then narrate it orally. On first day they would remember the theme and the plot only, the second day they would remember the most important characters in the story and their role, the third day they would remember almost half of the story and remaining of the events that were making the story very interesting. On the last day again they would be told to narrate the whole story and you would find the most outstanding results. Now the student will be narrating the whole story with ease without taking help from any body.

This process is conceptualized in the term Schema whereby reader begins to develop a coherent interpretation of text through the interactive process of “combining textual information with the information a reader brings to text”. (Grabe, 1988:56) Here the students have perceived in their mental framework the theme and plot of the story and by repeating the practice again and again, they ultimately could narrate the whole story without reading from the book.

According to Piaget, one’s schemata are the mental structures by which individuals organize their perceived environment. They are essentially the mental maps of various features that are constructed of reality that one possesses. It is quite true that in the reading process that was followed, facts were not only gathered in the mind but also gathering by filling new information into one’s prior schema, hereby readers could thus forge a connection between them. What ever the new information in the form of theme, plot or sentences were added, they were processed by the previous schema, and ultimately, there was formation of the new schema. The steps were simply Schema A (background knowledge)+Schema B (new information)=Schema C (new schema).

In a narration, if the reader is able to understand when an event happened, where it happened, why it happened, how story progressed and about the main character including evaluation of the author, then he / she would sure to attain a good memory of the reading materials and is surely a rational and practical approach.

When this theory was applied following the steps mentioned above, it definitely improved the performance of the students. After application of this theory, students were made to go through another level of SLEP and SILL tests. After careful analysis of the results, the score of memory strategy, which was minimum in previous test increased considerably and it reached the second place. This clearly shows that they started using more of memory strategy and were focusing on storing and recalling of information.

Other Studies

Literary genre is encapsulated as four different analogies: biological analogy, the family analogy, the institutional and speech act analogy but we would not be going through these analogies and concepts rather the literary analogy to make the framework of the memorizing techniques in the context of schematic. By showing how these conceptual analogies can be adopted to highlight the literary genre, a pluralistic approach needs to be adopted and a conceptual framework can be applied to some aspects of the generic field. (Fishelov, 1989)

Linguistics in the twentieth century has to undergo through two stages process: in the first half the concept of description arrived which was adopted by structuralists while the second half was the approach of explanation when information was forged before linguistics that mere describing of languages was not sufficient for making students adhere to language. The first one is Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative (TG) grammar that started from 1950s and second is Halliday’s Systemic -Functional Grammar (SFG) which again started from the 1970s, they are both explanatory, as the only difference between the two being, the former has psychological approach while the other adopts sociological concept. (Song, 2005)

Therefore, the formal linguistics and the functional linguistics have now emerged as the two different exponents in the modern linguistics. Generally it is a belief that validation is required before any theory is passed yet no researcher is able to give justification that this theory has more success rate or other.

All the theories are formed as a complimentary to each other. By the start of the 1980, pragmatics was considered to be the most accepted form of linguistic when it came to phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. This is also true that these pragmaticists have an influence of Chomsky’s TG grammar. This theory is largely based on psychological and philosophical approach. “Pragmatics put its emphasis on the inherent logical relations of the discourse, the formally incoherent but semantically coherent language phenomenon the illocutionary force and conversational implicature, etc” (Song, 2005, p. 30)

Genre theory is also added in context to language and the meaning of which is more potentiality and resource. Generally, language users make different wording patterns or different structures of text, because there are continuous situations in the culture whereby people interact and act on the social activities, this contextual regularity gives rise to regularities in texts. (Song, 2005)

They say that the text generally has simple past tense and the use of references, people and places and all of them are very familiar about the way sequence of events adopts to chronologically. In fact Halliday focus that language structure and language function are related to each other systematically. (Song, 2005)

There are many who wanted to learn the second language and therefore the learning implies Second Language Acquisition. It requires that there should be attraction with the people around here but at several situations in this very meaningful interaction, the speakers are not concerned with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. (Song, 2005)

The best methods are also like that of those, which gives supply of “comprehensible input during the situations of low anxiety with the messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are ‘ready’, recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production.” (Schutz, 2007)

There are various ways and strategies for the adoption of the learning by the students. Besides, for the students of West, these theories provide a broader picture what they wanted to know? This social-constructionist teaching has been initiated by Lev Vygotsky. In other words it is also called as social constructivism.

For Vygotsky, the culture bestows upon the child with the cognitive tools that are required for their development and it is this type and quality of tools that determines, which is responsible for the student’s to gain the pattern and rate of development. Adults like parents and teachers are tools for them over which they could use their culture while teaching them their language. These tools facilitate the students to get very well versant to the language of alien and other nation. (Chen, Online)

Conclusion

After applying Genre theory, it was widely seen that application of Genre theory helped to attain a good memory of the reading materials and improved the performance of the students whereas earlier they were using more of the metacognitive strategies and thus is effective in EFL reading classes.

There are many strategies and methods available pertaining to giving knowledge and teaching students methods for them to memorize. In the above-mentioned case too, only requirement is to adopt the particular approach in a particular way to make it conducive for students to learn.

Reference List

Aebersold, J.A. & Field, M.L. 1997. From Reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chen, Irene. Social Constructivist Theories. Web.

Fisheloy,D. 1989. Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory. Penn State Press.

Fowler, A. 1989. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Harvard University Press.

Grabe, W. (1988) Reassessing the Term ‘Interactive’, in Carrell, P.L., Devine, J. and Eskey, D.E. (eds) Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: CUP.

Hampson, P.J. & Morris, P.E. 1995. Understanding Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Hutchinson, T. & Waters, A. (1987). English for Specific Purposes: A Learning-centred Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oxford, R. (1990). Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Schutz, R. 2007. Stephen Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition. Web.

Song, Y. 2005. The Complementary Relation between Pragmatics and Systemic-Functional Grammar. US-China Foreign Language 3(11): 29-35.

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