The Effect of Genre-Based Teaching Approach on the Persian Writing Performance of the Fifth-Grade Bilingual Students

Introduction
Teaching writing skills to bilingual students has always been one of the major tasks of the primary education system. Accordingly, the use of different methods and techniques for the effective teaching of writing skills has always been encouraged over the past few decades. Despite this, little attention has been paid to creativity in teaching writing, even Persian writing, skills of Iranian bilingual students. Considering this, this study aims at investigating the impact of the genre-based teaching approach on Persian writing performance of the fifth-grade bilingual students in the elementary schools of Urmia, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran.
 
Research Hypotheses
1-                The genre-based teaching approach affects the fifth-grade bilingual students' biography writing performance in the Persian language course.
2-      The genre-based teaching approach affects the fifth-grade bilingual students' summary writing performance in the Persian language course.
3-      The genre-based teaching approach affects the fifth-grade bilingual students' diary writing performance in the Persian language course.
4-      The genre-based teaching approach affects the fifth-grade bilingual students' report writing performance in the Persian language course.
 
Research materials and method
The present researchers benefitted from a quasi-experimental research design for conducting this study. The research data was collected over the 2018-2019 academic year and the study population were all the fifth-grade elementary school students in Urmia. At first, from among all the elementary schools in Urmia, one was randomly selected through cluster sampling method. Then, after obtaining a permission letter from the education organization and also school officials' consent, one class was randomly selected from among the fifth-grade classes. The 30 students in the class were then randomly assigned either to the control or the experimental group. Before beginning the intervention program, a writing skill test was administered as the pre-test to the two groups. The test was designed by the researchers and its validity and reliability were assessed and confirmed. It was developed based on the Persian language curriculum of the fifth grade, assessed participants' biography, summary, diary, and report writing skills, and composed of 8 written items, two items for each skill. Then, the genre-based approach to teaching was used, as the independent variable, to teach writing skills to the experimental and control groups for ten 45-minute classroom sessions. After the 10^th session, the writing test was rerun, this time as the post-test. Students' writing skill was next assessed by considering their abilities in making sentences and connecting with the topic. The collected data were then analyzed through the use of descriptive and inferential statistics.
 
Results
Based on the obtained results, experimental group students' ability in writing developed significantly after the use of genre-based approach to teaching writing skills. In other words, the findings revealed a significant difference in the post-test and pre-test performances of  experimental and control groups regarding their abilities in writing biographies, summaries, diaries, and reports.  
 
 
Discussion
The use of genre-based teaching approach to teaching writing skills can help students overcome such psychological barriers as anxiety to their writing skill development and improve their self-regulation skills. Writing is creative, and thus it is involved with the creation of thoughts and ideas in the one hand and creation and regulation of ideas in linguistic forms on the other hand.
Adopting the genre teaching approach, teachers can create positive human interactions with learners, provide them with good models to copy, teach them the general principles and concepts more effectively, and heighten their sense of exploration. This way, teachers create a friendly atmosphere in which students can feel calm, cope with their stress through their learning process, and develop their autonomy. In other words, through benefitting from different teaching approached and methods, teacher can provide students with useful information and then ask them some questions. This way, students can gain the necessary insight by using the available information and improve their writing skills.
With regard to the high efficiency of this approach in improving the writing skill of fifth graders, school administrators and curriculum developers are strongly suggested to benefit from the genre-based teaching approach to help lower grade students improve their writing skills.