An Empirical Study On The Application Of Theme-Rheme Theory To Reading Teaching Of Non-English Majors In Vocational College

Higher education has developed vigorously these decades in China. As animportant part of higher education, vocational college attracts more preferences for itsfeatures such as short learning time and practical skills. As an essential component ofteaching subjects, English plays a vital role in vocational college education. However,there are lots of problems in English teaching especially in reading. It can be largelyattributed to the traditional reading teaching model.In order to improve students’ proficiency in reading, the thesis tries introducingTheme-Rheme theory to English reading teaching. Theme-Rheme theory provides anew way to divide a sentence which is different from grammar structure division.What’s more, it helps to grasp the text as a whole. With the inspiration fromMathesius’s view about theme and rheme, the thesis takes Halliday’s Theme-Rhemetheory as its theoretical basis. At the same time, six thematic progression patternsproposed by Huang Guowen are combined with Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theory inthis thesis to help conduct the experiment. The research questions which are expectedto be answered by the experiment are as follows:1. What is the situation of non-English majors’ English reading in vocationalcollege?2. Can the application of Theme-Rheme theory improve students’ readingproficiency?3. Can the application of Theme-Rheme theory improve the scores of all kinds ofreading tasks in vocational college teaching?The subjects are60non-English majors from Jinzhou Teachers Training College.They come from two natural classes, Grade2011. One of the classes (30students) israndomly chosen as the experimental class, the other class is named the controlledclass (30students). Theme-Rheme theory is applied to reading teaching in theexperimental class while the traditional reading teaching model is used in thecontrolled class. The research lasts for a semester. At the beginning and at the end ofthe experiment, the instruments such as Questionnaires, reading comprehension testsand interview are conducted to help collect the data. According to the results analyzedfrom the data by the software SPSS11.5, the following findings are shown：1. Before the application of Theme-Rheme theory, most of the students admitreading is a very important in English learning. However, many problems exists in teaching practice. Students are not interested in reading very much. Students neitheroften use reading skills nor strategies. The most common problems which confusestudents most in reading are about text knowledge, text structure and inner connectionbetween sentences and paragraphs as well as the author’s attitude, view, purpose in atext. What’s more, teachers also do not pay attention to the teaching of these aspectswhich are mentioned above.2. The students in EC perform much better than students in CC with the help ofthe application of Theme-Rheme theory to reading teaching.3. The application of Theme-Rheme theory in reading teaching can improve thescores of most types of reading tasks except English-Chinese Phrases Match. Studentsget unobvious improvements in this task.All in all, the application of Theme-Rheme theory to reading teaching canimprove proficiency of non-English majors.