A Study Of The Thematic Progression Patterns Of Reading Passages In CET-4

Reading is an important part of English learning, and in the test of CET-4, readingcomprehension always takes a large proportion. In the old test papers before2005, it takes40%, and in the new test papers after2005, it still takes35%. The reading test of CET-4not only tests students’ understanding of contents in different genres, but also tests theirreading speed.Teaching of reading comprehension is an important part in English teaching. Intraditional English teaching, teachers focus on analysis of words and sentences, but rarelyanalyzing the connection of information and the development of semantic venation fromthe respective of relationship among sentences and the level of text. Thus, in reading,students always put much attention to words and have bad reading habits such as readingback, reading with fingers, etc., therefore, they cannot have a good understanding of thepassage from the perspective of genre, structure and paragraphs. Within limited time, theyget scattered information with low accuracy and their reading comprehension ability andspeed are not up to the requirements of CET-4.To solve these problems, many scholars have already begun to explore the methods toimprove reading comprehension abilities from the respective of discourse analysis. Thispaper, based on the theory of Thematic Progression patterns of systematic functionallinguistics, tries to analyze100passages from1997-2010CET-4papers by setting upcorpus. The corpus is divided into narration, exposition, argumentation and description,then the use of theme-rheme patterns in each genre and their general and specialdistribution characteristics are summarized: the general distribution characteristics are that:the dominating patterns are the constant theme, the simple linear and the independentpattern, other patterns are rarely used; the special distribution characteristics are that: innarration, the dominating pattern is the constant theme, the second one is the independentpattern; in description, the constant theme is the dominating pattern, then the simple linearand the independent pattern are equally used; in argumentation, the independent pattern isthe dominating pattern and the constant theme is the second; in exposition, eight patternsare all used, among which, the constant theme is dominating, the independent pattern isthe second, and the simple linear and Constant rheme are also widely used.The author hopes that the findings in this study can provide help to English teachingand the cultivation of students’ reading comprehension ability, help teachers instruct students to quickly understand the contents, the author’s writing methods and the aim fromthe respective of stylistic features and typical thematic progression patterns in differenttypes of passage, which can help students understand the textual information as a wholeand improve the accuracy of information understanding. Meanwhile, the findings can alsobe applied to writing teaching and be used to instruct students to write the contentsaccording to the typical thematic progression patterns in different genre, which canimprove the logic and correlation of contents arrangement and improve their writingability.