In recent years, movie class plays a more and more important role in English teaching in China. Most teachers require students to write movie reviews after watching the movie. However, how to write movie review is still remain unclear to students. Some student download a review from the internet, and some write a summary of the movie instead.
Genre analysis is a system of analysis by which observations are made on the repeated communicative functions found in genres and on the linguistic features of these functions (Brett, 1994). Genre knowledge played an important role in helping novices understand how to produce academics, professional or educational discourse. Genre study can help to improve Chinese students’ movie review writing skills. This study was conducted using the framework of genre analysis to explore move structure and underlying patterns of movie review as a genre.
The movie we choose is The King’s Speech, an Oscar award winner. The movie combines educational meaning with humorous performance. The story may seem boring but it was well organized and each of the characters in the movie has his or her distinct personalities. We consider a movie like this one can arouse students’ interests, and students can also have plenty materials to write in their movie reviews. The movie was shown in movie class in Zhejiang University and all students were asked to finish a movie review. There was no word limit, so all students can write as much as they want.
After all the movie review was collected, we find out that some of them were copied from the internet. Besides, several movie reviews have less than one hundred word. It was clear that these students have not taken this work seriously and these movie reviews cannot represent their true ability. We rule out all these movie reviews and choose ten samples from the entire movie reviews randomly.
2. Literature Review
Genre has different meaning in different fields. Among them, Swales’