Investigating The Role Of Thematic Theory In College English Reading

Due to the important role of reading among the basic language skills, how to improve Chinese students'reading proficiency in English has been the hot topic discussed by many linguists and language teachers. The process and essence of reading have been studied from different angles for many years, and massive contributions have been made, among which are Bottom-up approach, Top-down approach and Interactive approach, which is popular now. All of these researches have one single aim --- to improve the reading efficiency of language learners.Chinese non-English majors have their general characters and typical features compared with other learners at different ages and with different knowledge. These typical features will definitely affect their reading proficiency in second language. The writer of this thesis tries to introduce the Thematic Theory to them, and prove the hypothesis that Thematic Theory can promote their reading efficiency, which will be beneficial in college English teaching and facilitate the global improvement of students'second language level.The study tries to answer the following questions: (1) Are there some problems to be solved in College English Reading teaching and learning? (2) Can Thematic Theory help to solve these problems, if they exist? (3) If it can, how does it work? (4) If it can't, what's the reason? According to the object of the research, the writer adopts some research tools such as questionnaire, pre test and post test to gain sufficient information and data.According to the information gained from the questionnaires, there are some problems in the college English reading and teaching: (1) less attention to reading practice (2) lower efficiency in reading class (3) improper ways of reading, including inappropriate reading habits, lack of proper reading strategies and skills, lack of discourse knowledge, and insufficient reading practice. The results of two tests can be found in following tables: From the analysis of the data collected in the study, it can be easily found that Thematic Theory may help readers grasp the main idea of a passage in shorter time and improve the correct rate of answers to questions concerning detailed information in a passage. Thus, it may promote fast reading and reading in depth to a certain degree.To sum up, the study tentatively shows that it might be feasible to introduce Thematic Theories to non-English majors in college English reading teaching.