| English reading has become an indispensable means of language communication and information sharing. Meanwhile it has become an important skill for everybody especially for the students who will take the college entrance examination. Due to the traditional teaching methods, the teachers mainly focus on the words and grammar but they pay less attention to the relationship of the words and paragraphs in a text, then how to change the learning habit of the students and improve their reading proficiency in English has been a hot discussion among many linguistics and teachers in recent years.In order to solve the current situation about English reading learning, this thesis discusses how the English teachers in China apply the thematic theory in the English reading Class. The thematic theory is an essential part of the discourse analysis theory among systematic functional grammar. And the notion of theme is put forward by Weil in 1844, while the one who brings the thematic theory into a new system is Halliday(1967) who is the founder of Systemic Functional Grammar. Later for enlarging the thematic theory, Danes in 1974 articulated a correlation of sentence in the discourse as the thematic progression pattern, which is beneficial to organize the passage for the reader. While it was in the late 1970 s, the thematic theory firstly researched by the Chinese linguists and scholars.In this study through the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the writer applied the thematic theory into a real English teaching class. The participants are 130 students from Hu Ludao No.2 senior high school come from two parallel classes named as experimental class(EC) and controlled class(CC) randomly for the controlled class with 64 students and the experiment class with 66 students. At the same time, during the four months teaching process the thematic theory is taught in the experimental class while the traditional method is applied to the reading teaching in the controlled class. In this experiment the instruments such as questionnaire, pre-test, post-test and interview are conducted to help collect data. Then the data analyzed by software SPSS11.5.Finally after the experiment the research questions are expected to be answered as follows.1. Whether the thematic theory reading model can arouse the students’ interests in English reading comprehension?2. Can the teaching method based on thematic theory improve the students’ ability of getting the main idea in the reading comprehension?3. Can the application of thematic theory improve students’ ability of answering the detail questions in the reading comprehension?This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction of the background and the organization. Chapter two is the literature review which presents a general review of the thematic theory, and demonstrates an application of thematic progression to English reading. Chapter three is the research design which includes the question, subjects and procedure of the experiment. Chapter four is the results and data analyses which consist of the analyses of questionnaire, pre-test, post-test, and interview. Chapter five summarizes the implication, limitation and the suggestions of the thematic theory.The findings of this study provide some implications for applying thematic theory to senior English reading teaching. The study also puts forward a feasible method to senior students, which will help learns to get the main idea and grasp the structure of the text, so as to arouse their reading interests. |
