The purpose of this thesis is to explore the effects of genre-based writing on EFL learners'' writing ability and attitude. For this study, three middle-school students, three high-school students, and three university students were chosen as the participants and given writing instruction
with six genre types such as letter, dialogue, giving information,
comparison, and persuasion. The instruction was conducted twice a week for sixteen weeks. In order to measure the students'' writing abilities,
pre-writing and post-writing were performed before and after the treatment. In addition, questionnaires, oral interviews and journal writing were conducted for data collection. Physical structure analysis,
holistic/analytical scoring, and topical structure analysis were carried out to evaluate writing products. For the purpose of this study, three
research questions were proposed: 1) How does genre-based writing affect students'' writing; 2) How does the genre type affect students writing; and 3) How does genre writing affect students’ attitude toward
writing and English learning?
The following results have been obtained in this study:
First, the students'' writing improved significantly over the instructional period. Yet, there was a difference in improvement among the student
groups. In physical analysis, the ratings of physical structure analysis of the high-school students were the best but in analytical scoring, the
ratings were low. This implies that the high school students had relatively better syntactic knowledge but performed poorly in overall
writing. In topical structure analysis, the number of T-unit topics and T-units per topic of the middle-school students increased the most. Genre-Based writing gave the highest impact on the middle-school
students when it came to fluency and topic coherence.
Second, there were significant differences among genre types. All three kinds of data analysis revealed that the students performed well in writing the genre text of giving information, comparison, and persuasion.
In contrast, they performed poorly in letter and dialogue writing. This result can be attributable to the fact that students were less exposed to
practical genre types such as letter and dialogues than the other genre types. They weren’t given opportunities to be familiar with letter and
dialogue genre types since school textbooks rarely contain such genres.
Third. there were meaningful changes in attitude toward writing and English learning. Genre writing has contributed to enhancing the students'' interest, need, self-evaluation, and confidence in writing and English learning. Intrinsic motivation in all three groups increased over time, but
extrinsic motivation decreased in middle-school and university students.
High-school students, however, showed no difference in extrinsic motivation, which can be attributed to college entrance exam Findings of this study have the following pedagogical implications for effective genre-based writing: 1) English teachers should recognize the
role of writing as a communicative skill and lead students to work with genre-focused tasks, regardless of proficience level; 2) In order to achieve balanced writing skills, students need to be exposed to a variety
of genre types; 3) Reading materials including storybooks and literary works are to be used to provide models for preparation and stimulus for writing; 4) Students should be given proper feedback for linguistic
accuracy as well as contents in order to maximize the effects of genre writing; 5) Further studies are needed to investigate writing classes with more participants and for a longer period.