Application Of The Thematic Theory To English Reading Class In A High School

With the development of information technology and international communication, English reading has become an indispensable skill for everyone, especially for those who will take the college entrance examination. How to improve students’reading ability has been heatedly discussed from different perspectives in recent years. Many scholars have studied reading based on a variety of reading theories such as Bottom-up Model, Top-down Model, Interactive Model and Schema-theoretic Model.With the popularity of the functional linguistics, the Thematic Theory has been applied to the research of reading in more universities and high schools in cities. The writer of this thesis applied the Thematic Theory to English reading class in a rural high school in order to identify the relationship between the application of the Thematic Theory and the reading accuracy and fluency. To make the findings of research more objective and convincing, the writer utilized different research methods ranging from surveys, interviews to tests.The research indicates with the application of the Thematic Theory, the students’ reading accuracy declined at the beginning of the experiment and then improved. On the whole, the experiment class outperformed the controlled class. The research has some limitations due to its time constraint and further research needs to be carried out in the future.