Exploring Students' Perceptions and Attitudes towards Genre-based Pedagogy Developed in Persuasive Writing Teaching: The Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Previous studies in genre-based pedagogy mainly concerned with its teaching effects, few studies involved with students' perceptions and attitudes which is actually playing a role in teaching and learning activities. The present study intends to make some explorations in this aspect. A quasi-experimental study to designed to answer the research question "What are students' perceptions and attitudes towards the genre-based pedagogy developed in Chinese university students' persuasive writings?" Thirty-four students participated in the study and a four-point Likert scale questionnaire and an interview were applied to collect the data. After the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study find that most participants hold positive attitudes towards every item of the questionnaire and think highly of the genre-based teaching pedagogy from the following six aspects: the mastery of textual features, the genre-awareness of persuasion, confidence in writing an effective persuasion, attitudes towards group writing in the teaching instruction, interests in the application of the curriculum cycle to other genres and other program instruction related comments such as being difficult to master certain required language features and following the teaching patterns involved in the textual construction of persuasion. However, the general indication is that the curriculum cycle can help and enhance students' understandings of each of the textual features of persuasion. Finally, the study provides implications for future teaching: the genre-based approach could be effectively and widely applied in Chinese university students' genre writing as the apprenticeship involved allows the students to be more creative as their writing skills develop.