Application Of Thematic Theory In Teaching Of College English Rfaning:an Empirical Study

Reading is an important means of language acquisition, communication, and sharing information and ideas. Reading skill has long been taken as an important language learning skill. Therefore, reading teaching plays an extremely important role in EFL teaching. And how to improve Chinese students’reading skill has become the common concern of linguists and English teachers.This thesis, taking Thematic Theory as the theoretical framework, tries to prove that the teaching of Thematic Theory could improve students’reading and second language learning skills. It tries to answer the following two questions:first, could the learners’ performance in fast reading be improved by applying Thematic Theory in teaching college English reading? Second, could the learners’performance in in-depth reading be improved by applying Thematic Theory in teaching college English reading? The subjects are the first-year non-English majors at Jincheng College of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who have the same average English proficiency level. This thesis takes both the quantitative and qualitative methods. The two parallel classes are taught by the same teacher with different teaching methods. The control class (CC) takes the traditional teaching method while the experimental class (EC) adopts the teaching method based on Thematic Theory. Data are collected by means of administering pre-and post-tests, and conducting retrospective interviews. And the collected data are analyzed with the aid of SPSS17.0.The results of the independent samples t-tests reveal that there is a significant difference between the two teaching methods. Data analysis reveals that there are three major findings in this research:1) Through one semester’s different teaching methods, the subjects from EC perform much better than the subjects from CC in fast reading, which indicates that teaching reading courses in the perspective of Thematic Theory is superior to the traditional teaching method in improving students’ability in fast reading.2) In in-depth reading, there is no significant difference between the subjects from EC and CC, which indicates that the teaching method based on Thematic Theory does not improve students’performance in in-depth reading. The result analysis for different types of questions in post-test indicates that Thematic Theory has no significant influence on question concerning the replacement of word and on question concerning the exclusion, which contributes to the students’performance in in-depth reading. The findings of the present study provide some implications for applying Thematic Theory to teaching reading courses. This study also puts forward a somewhat feasible approach to college English reading teaching, which will help Chinese learners to grasp the structure and the main idea of the text, so as to improve their reading ability.