The Analysis Of Thematic Progression Features In Broadcast News And Its Application To Teaching Of Listening

The present thesis firstly investigates the sample scripts of broadcast news in terms of thematic structure and Thematic Progression (TP) pattern, aiming to find out some particular Thematic Progression features in this genre, and then applies the results to the teaching of listening in TEFL.In the first part, a corpus of 50 news scripts chosen from the websites of BBC and VOA was collected to conduct a TP pattern analysis, aiming to find out the specific TP characteristics in this genre. This analysis is based on the theoretical framework of six TP patterns, i.e. Parallel, Continuous, Concentrated, Alternative, Coordinate and Derivative, which comes from Huang (黄衍 1985)'s model of seven TP patterns. The results indicate that broadcast news prefers employing Parallel and Concentrated patterns more frequently in order to grasp the audience's attention, with Continuous, Derivative, Alternative and Coordinate patterns followed.Based on this finding, a hypothesis was proposed that the awareness of the thematic knowledge and TP characteristics in broadcast news may aid the students in generating the main idea of the news. A teaching experiment, the second step of the study, was then conducted to prove whether the findings in TP analysis was applicable to the teaching of news listening. In the control and experiment group design, an intervention was carried out in the experiment group which contains 32 students. They received a 36-class program on thematic knowledge in broadcast news and its application to news listening comprehension, while the subjects in the control group were uninterrupted. With a questionnaire and a pretest, no significant between-group difference was found in the subjects' ability in generating the main idea of news items in two groups. However, after the three-month long treatment, the subjects in the experiment group outperformedthose in the control group in the posttest of news listening comprehension. T-test was then adopted to testify the between-group difference in the scores in the pretest and posttest.It was found that learners' awareness of thematic knowledge and TP features in broadcast news positively affects the performance in generating the main idea of news items. This result suggests that in the teaching of news listening, Chinese EFL teacher may consider developing learners' awareness of TP knowledge to improve their ability in grasping the main idea of news items.