A Study On Junior High School English Reading Teaching Based On Thematic Progression Model

The English curriculum standards of compulsory education in 2022 emphasizes that,the reading ability is the most effective means to develop students’ comprehensive language application ability.However,the questionnaire provided by this paper shows that,junior middle school students don’t have right reading habits,skills and strategies to overcome the difficulties in reading.And,according to some studies,the short of discourse analysis becomes a major hindrance of reading comprehension.Because thematic progression theory emphasizes the division of theme and rheme from the full text in order to find the semantic relationship between sentences and the way to expand theme in each paragraph,so as to understand the distribution of the central content of the text and the framework of the article,and the information focus,interpersonal function,ideational function of theme-rheme will work together in the discourse analysis,this thesis will focus on how to help students read and improve their reading proficiency in junior high school English reading teaching based on thematic progression model.This study selected 54 students from two classes of Grade 8 in a foreign language school in Chengdu as the research participants.Using questionnaires,text analysis and tests as research tools,this paper conducted a 12 weeks research on English reading teaching in junior middle school based on thematic progression model in two experimental classes.The data of questionnaire as well as two tests before and after the experiment will be analyzed by SPSS 26.0 statistical software.The following problems are studied in this paper:1.What’s the most common thematic progression model in junior high school English narrations?2.How well do the students’ identification of the realization devices of theme-rheme in reading?3.What’s the influence of thematic progression model on junior high school English reading teaching?Through the analysis of 10 selected narrations,this paper found that the same theme pattern and simple linear pattern are the two most common models,and the experiential theme and textual theme is the frequently used theme in the chosen narrations.What’s more,through teaching and practice,students’ identification of the realization devices of theme-rheme have been improved,especially the identification of thematic structure and the transitivity.At last,students’ reading proficiency can be improved by analyzing the realization devices of theme-rheme and their understanding of information focus,interpersonal function and ideational function,including details,main idea,author’s attitude,inference and guessing new words.In addition to obtaining research findings,some matters need to be paid attention to in this paper.First,teachers should master the basic knowledge of thematic progression model and teach it to students.Secondly,while applying the thematic progression model in reading teaching,all the students are supposed to be guided to identify the realization devices of theme-rheme by figuring out the beginning part,subject,the ending part,predicate and the object of each sentence.Finally,teachers should give enough exercise for students to consolidate and output.Besides,some deficiencies also lie in this thesis.For instance,the chosen participants is small and the study time is short,which may reduce the generalization of the research results.And also,we should analyze more text genres.