A Study On English Reading Teaching Strategies Based On The Thematic Meaning In Junior High School

The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School（2017）put forward the important concept of thematic meaning which includes man and nature,man and society,and man and self.It conveys the thoughts,emotions,attitudes,values and cultural connotations of passages,and it promotes the formation of students’ key competence.However,nowadays,many teachers still focus too much on the ‘achievement-based’ teaching,and teach reading in a fragmented way which lacks the guidance of the thematic meaning and didn’t notice how important the thematic meaning is.And it results in the inability to achieve the improvement of student’s comprehensive reading competence.This paper tries to find out what reading teaching strategies based on thematic meaning are adopted by teachers.The purpose is to give English teachers some guidance to teach reading based on the thematic meaning.In this study,106 teachers from junior high school in Shangcheng District of Hangzhou are chosen to do the questionnaire survey,and three teachers are chosen to take part in the interview.These three teachers are selected according to their teaching experience.The author chooses 5experienced teachers in his school as the subjects of classroom observation and explores the following two questions by using questionnaire survey method,interview method and classroom observation method:1.What is the understanding and applying of thematic meaning of junior high school teachers in current English teaching?2.What reading teaching strategies do teachers use based on the thematic meaning?The results show that junior high school teachers are aware of the thematic meaning and its importance,but most teachers are not clear about the specific implementation and the role the thematic meaning plays in classroom teaching.Then the reading teaching strategies based on thematic meanings adopted by the teachers are diversified,which can be divided into teaching strategies of perceiving thematic meanings,understanding thematic meanings,and sublimating thematic meanings,such as real context creation,key information extraction,discourse logic understanding,character image analysis,divergent understanding of thematic meaning,and author’s opinion analysis,etc.The teaching activities are closely combined with the thematic meaning,which improve students’ reading competence from different thinking levels.