A Study On The Application Of Theme-based Reading In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading proficiency is one of the basic English language ability required by the new English curriculum standards,and it is also the basis and premise of developing other language skills.The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017 Edition)lists thematic context as the most important component of English curriculum,and is often put at the first place.The curriculum standard also points out that the theme provides the scope or thematic contexts for language learning.Students’ exploration of thematic meaning should be regarded as the most vital part in language learning,which directly influences the level of students’ understanding of discourse,the thinking ability and the language learning effectiveness.Theme-based reading provides a new way of reading teaching.It is conducive to the combination of teaching content and language learning and the transfer of students’ attention from language form to discourse meaning,and also to fully tap the cultural information carried by specific topics to develop students’ thinking quality on the basis of integrating language knowledge and language skills.Based on the Input Hypothesis,Relevance theory and Schema theory,the researcher chose 80 students of grade one from a senior high school in Lanzhou as the research subjects,used English reading test papers,questionnaires and interview as research instruments,and discussed the following two questions after a semester of teaching experiment.First,can the application of Theme-based Reading in senior high school improve students’ reading comprehension achievement in following four dimensions(Summing up and summarizing,Questions of details,Words in context and Inference)? Second,can the application of Theme-based Reading in senior high school have an impact on students’ thinking quality tendency? In the experimental class,the researcher expanded 6 articles of each theme based on the text under the theme of teaching unit,each about 300-400 words.In the course of theme-based reading,different teaching activities are designed to improve English reading in four dimensions(Summing up and summarizing,Questions of details,Words in context and Inference),and thus improving students’ English reading comprehension achievements.Before and after the experiment,the researcher tested English reading achievements and thinking quality tendency of the students in experimental class respectively.After the treatment,with the help of SPSS.23,the data obtained by Independent Sample and Paired Samples T-test were analyzed.The results showed that theme-based reading can facilitate students’ English reading performance in four dimensions including Summing up and summarizing,Questions of details,Words in context and Inference,but to different degrees.At the same time,theme-based reading can have impacts on students’ thinking quality tendency.The results of this thesis have implications for the teaching of theme-based reading and cultivation of students’ thinking quality.In the teaching of theme-based reading,teachers should expand reading materials based on the theme of the text.More importantly,the materials selected should be closely related to the students’ real life and of moderate difficulty,which need to be in line with the level of students’ cognitive development and possess certain educational enlightenment and value.At the same time,we should fully tap the cultural information of specific theme and develop students’ thinking quality on the basis of integrating language knowledge and language skills.