Theme-Rheme Theory And Research Of English Reading Teaching

Reading is an indispensable cognitive activity in human society. Reading is also a minor way to grasp linguistic knowledge and get information. Developing the students'reading ability is the aim of English teaching. At the same time, reading is regarded as the focus among the five skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. In recent years, China has paid more and more attention to reading teaching of EFL. Either the College English Syllabus (1999), or the Program of Teaching Quality and Teaching Reform in Institutions of Higher Education (2003), or the Teaching Requirements of College English (tried out)(2004), puts its emphasis to reading teaching, and improves simultaneously the students'integral abilities of using English. However, the author thinks there is an obvious disparity between the present reading teaching an the fixed requirements. The teacher teaches a lot about words and grammar, but ignores the relationship of words and paragraphs in the text. So changing the teaching ideas, studying the nature of reading, cultivating students a good reading habit and training their reading strategies will be subject of the thesis that is designed to solve reading problems for non-English majors.This thesis reports on how English teachers in China used "Theme-Rheme" Structure Analysis approach of reading comprehension teaching in their English reading classes. Based on the Systemic Functional Grammar theory in the teaching of reading comprehension, the "Theme and Rheme" Structure Analysis approach has been introduced into the traditional English classroom in China. Comparing the effect of using the traditional "bottom-up" strategy with that of using the "Theme and Rheme" structure analysis approach in the reading course for English majors of a Chinese university, the researcher believes that some reading strategies popular in English-speaking countries did work well in Chinese setting as long as the teachers can take into account their students'learning style. This thesis puts forward that the Theme-Rheme Mode of Textual Analysis is an ideal one in English reading, and elaborates the application of the "Theme and Rheme" Structure Analysis approach to English course in China, and the author has done a lot of experiments. After the experiment, the researcher found that the students have greatly improved their reading speed and achieved more effective reading comprehension.The Theme-analysis reading approach tries to describe the nature of reading from the perspective of how a text is organized by the writer who intends to convey a certain idea or message in written form. It considers reading as a communication of a message from writer to the reader. This approach contributes to improve the students'reading ability at discourse level; to reinforce the students'awareness of theme-rheme knowledge, to get the students not neglect the language points and simultaneously grasp the global structure of the text; to teach the students to identify theme, rheme, thematic progression; to provide the students with background knowledge and to cultivate the students'ability of inferring and predicting from context. Consequently, it is essential for the readers to master the discourse micro and macro structure in order to improve the reading efficiency, and the theory of theme, rheme etc is the key to direct reading comprehension.Through the analysis of practical application result, we come to conclusion that the theme-analysis reading approach is feasible and efficient, it can help to improve the students reading competence. However, it is not perfect and it has its own deficiencies and needs to be improved. This thesis was divided into three parts, the first part is the theoretical background including chapter one,chapter two,chapter three. This part is about some researches on the Theme and Rheme analysis in foreign countries as well as some in China. Firstly, definitions of Theme, and Rheme are introduced; and then some opinions of reading (include effective reading, the limitation of schema theory of reading and application of thematic theory to reading teaching) are mentioned. This part also deals with the difference between traditional analysis approaches and textual analysis approaches, which is also the focus of this thesis. The reason for doing this research is trying to find a more effective way to help university students improve their English reading comprehension in classrooms. The second part was the application and experiment, it contains three chapters: chapter four,chapter five,chapter six. This part focuses on the specific examples of analysis on a passage as well as a long text in details. It proved that this kind of analysis approach can do the students a great help in grasping the global meaning within the least time. Besides that, this part also focuses on the procedures of the experiment. The subjects were fresh men of two universities. One class was experimental class, another is control class. Students of experimental class were taught with new method, the Theme-Rheme analysis approach was introduced in their reading comprehension classrooms. Then, there was a discussion about the effect of using Theme-Rheme analysis approach on the experimental class, that is: using the Theme-Rheme analysis approach on university students'reading comprehension has really improved the students reading accuracy as well as their reading speed. Chapter seven is the last part as the summary of the whole thesis.