Application Of The Theme-Rheme Theory In The Teaching Of Reading In Junior High Schools

According to National English Curriculum (NEC) for nine-year compulsory education, the reading proficiency of Junior 3 students should be improved to Level 5, which is considered as deep-level reading abilities such as inferring, predicting and concluding, etc. However, these deep-level reading abilities are discovered to be the most deficient abilities to the students in daily language teaching. The traditional reading teaching model, which is characterized by "Bottom-up" reading model, is the root of the problem.The Theme-rheme Approach is an important part of text linguistics. According to the Theory, every clause consists of two elements:theme and rheme. Theme is the starting-point of the message, which contains the given information, while rheme is the remainder of the message and it expresses the new information. A text is a combination of themes and rhemes. The theme in a particular sentence relates to the theme and rhemes in other sentences, and they work together to push the text forwards.This study focuses on the influence of the Theme-rheme Approach to reading teaching on the improvement of students'reading ability.32 Junior 3 students participated in a quasi-experiment, in which they were divided into three groups and received theme-rheme training. The concepts and principles of the Theme-rheme Approach were introduced to the participants and they were guided to apply the theory to analyze the passages. A pretest and a posttest were conducted to discern the effect of Theme-rheme training on the participants' reading proficiency. Apre-training questionnaire were designed to investigate the participants'reading habits, reading strategies and skills, their problems and solutions during the reading, etc., and a post-training questionnaire was provided to find out the results of the application of the Theme-rheme Approach by students'self-feedback.The findings show that:1) the Theme-rheme Approach was effective in improving the students'overall performance in their English reading; 2) the Theme-rheme Approach worked more significantly effectively on medium students than top students and low students, though it was effective on all groups; 3) the application of the Theme-rheme Approach in reading teaching and learning helps to increase the students' awareness and frequency of text knowledge use, enhance their confidence in reading, thereby improve their reading proficiency.These findings suggest that the application of the Theme-rheme Approach is an effective approach to improve the reading proficiency of junior middle school students.