A Study On Theme And Thematic Progression Patterns In Listening Comprehension Texts

As a branch of linguistics, discourse analysis is becoming a popular topic in the research of foreign language learning. Theme and thematic progression analysis draw the attention of many researchers in the field of study. There are many publications, nationally and internationally, on applying theme and thematic theory in different aspects of English teaching, such as reading, writing, and translating. However, little is known in listening, an important aspect of foreign language teaching and learning.This thesis is designed to study the features of theme and thematic progression in listening comprehension texts. A listening comprehension texts corpus is built, in which all the materials are collected from the official website of College English Tests Band 4. And 30 texts are selected as samples for manual studies. According to Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, theme and rheme in samples are identified; while thematic progression patterns are studied based on the combination of Danes' and Huang Yan's patterns. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed to analyze the data. The results show that the type of theme is mostly the unmarked and simple theme. Besides, the constant theme pattern and the same rheme pattern is employed more frequently than others. It is found that these features are closely correlated with the process of decoding the information. Thus they can help students better understand the development of information. This study has theoretical significance as well as practical value. It may help enrich the application of theme and thematic theory in analyzing listening comprehension texts. Besides it is also significant to the listening teaching and learning.