A Study Of The Application Of Thematic Progression To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

English reading teaching aims to help students read the text effectively.It is supposed to develop students’ skill of reading and improve their reading ability.However,in current English teaching practice,some English teachers only focus on grammar and vocabulary teaching,neglecting to helping students analyze the structure of discourse.In recent years,applying effective teaching method to English reading teaching to help students develop their reading ability have been received increasingly attention.This research attempts to apply thematic progression to English reading teaching,aiming to explore whether the application of thematic progression can help students understand the structure of the text and improve their reading ability.The concept of theme and rheme was first proposed by Czech linguist Mathesisus,he thought that the theme refers to the given information in a clause,while the rheme represents the new information.After that,Halliday and other linguists enriched and developed the theme and rheme theory.The concept of thematic progression was proposed by F.Danes,he put forward that some relationship and changes taken place among theme-rheme structures of sentences promotes the development of discourse,and this process can be called the thematic progression.This research takes the senior high school students as subjects.Before the teaching experiment,the reading texts were collected and classified into narration and exposition.Combining with the classification of thematic progression patterns proposed by Zhu Yongsheng,the author tries to find the commonly used patterns in collected texts.The research conducts a teaching experiment in which thematic progression is applied to English reading teaching in experimental class.In controlled class,the tradition teaching method is adopted.The teaching experiment aims to further explore the influences of applying thematic progression to English reading teaching on students,and to find the problems that may occur in the process of applying thematic progression to English reading teaching.The research questions are as follows:(1)What kinds of thematic progression patterns are commonly used in collected English reading texts?(2)What are the problems that may occur in the process of applying thematic progression to English reading teaching?(3)What are the influences of applying thematic progression to English reading teaching on students?Through analyzing the collected English reading texts and discussing the results of tests and questionnaire,the research findings are concluded as follows:Firstly,it can be found that the parallel thematic progression pattern is commonly used in the narration and exposition of the collected English reading texts,and the continuous pattern is in the second place.Meanwhile,some problems also may occur in the process of applying thematic progression to English reading teaching: students may have difficulty in dividing theme-rheme structures of long sentences,some low-achievement students may fail to conclude the main idea of the text by using thematic progression.Finally,applying thematic progression to English reading teaching can assist students in understanding the discourse structure.It can also arouse students’ interest in reading and help students grasp the main idea of the text in short time.