A Study Of The Thematic Theory In EFL Reading Teaching To Learners At The Stage Of Continuing Education

Reading is an important means in language acquisition, communication, and sharing information and ideas. These decades in China, Continuing Education has developed vigorously, because it’s a special learning stage with its own features, such as the shortage of learning time, the weakness of foreign language ability, but having better thinking mode. How to improve their ability of learning foreign language is worth discussing. To them, improving the proficiency in reading is very crucial.In order to improve students’proficiency in reading, the thesis attempts to introduce Thematic Theory to English reading teaching. Thematic Theory provides a new way to divide a sentence which is different from grammar structure division. What’s more, it helps to grasp the text as a whole. With the inspiration from Mathesius’s view about Theme and Rheme, the thesis takes Halliday’s Thematic Theory as its theoretical basis. In this thesis, the researcher applies six Thematic Progression Patterns which is put forward by Huang Guowen to help conduct the experiment in order to improve the Continuing Education learners’performances in English reading..The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction which introduces the background of the study, the goals and significance of the study, the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. The related studies of Thematic Theory and the application of Thematic Theory in English reading teaching are presented. The researcher mainly explores the Thematic Theory which is put forward by Halliday and some other linguists abroad and at home, and its application in the discourse analysis. Vilem Mathesius, the founder of Prague School, thinks that a sentence can be regarded as three parts-Theme, Rheme, and Transition. Halliday reviews the sentence function from the perspective of social semiology. He thinks there are three kinds of functions in a language, namely, textual metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and experiential metafunction. In Halliday’s book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Thematic Theory is the most important part. Theme-Rheme is meaningful not only in structure, but also in concept. It plays an important role in realizing the mode of discourse. Meanwhile, the related studies of application in EFL reading teaching are summarized.Chapter Three is the theoretical basis of this study. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the definitions and functions of Thematic Theory. The second.part elaborates the definitions of Theme and Rheme, as well as the classification of Theme. In the third part, the definitions of Thematic Progression and six types of Thematic Progression Patterns are expounded.Chapter Four is about the research design. This chapter consists of five parts -research questions, research subjects, research instruments, teaching procedure and data collection. The tester makes a survey of the students in Continuing Education College, Yangtze University with using the Thematic Theory as the entry point, in order to testify if there are any significant effects on adult learners’reading comprehension. And three research questions will be discussed:1) Can the Thematic Theory improve the reading accuracy? 2) What kind of learners (high level, middle level, and low level learners) will improve their reading ability obviously after employing the Thematic Theory? 3) Which style of reading text (narration, argumentation, exposition, practical writing) can the Thematic Theory influence most? The research instrument includes pretest and post-test reading comprehension test papers, interviews, teaching materials. The pretest and post-test papers are used to test and analyze the influence on experimental class with applying Thematic Theory in EFL reading teaching.The subjects are 60 adult English learners who are majoring in Nursing, from College of Continuing Education, Yangtze University. One of the classes (30 learners) is randomly chosen as the experimental class, the other class is named the controlled class (30 learners). Thematic Theory is applied in reading teaching in the experimental class while the traditional reading teaching model is used in the controlled class. The research lasts for four months. In the process of experiment, the instruments such as reading comprehension tests and interview are conducted to help collect the data. According to the results analyzed from the data by the software SPSS 19.0, the following findings are shown:1) The Thematic Theory can improve the accuracy of reading.2) After the Thematic Theory applies in reading teaching, the middle level and low level learners make progress significantly compared to the high level learners.3) When the learners are doing reading comprehension, this theory can influence narration and exposition most.Chapter Five is discussion and analysis of results. We can get a conclusion after making a quantitative analysis of the pretest and post-test data, making a comparative analysis of Mean and Standard deviation between experimental class and controlled class, and making a post-test analysis of the four different genres. After the experiment, six interviewees who are selected from the experimental class do the interview. The tester makes a record and analyzes the result of interview. According to the data and result of the experiment, the tester does a positive discussion of the effects which are making on learners’reading comprehension and four different types of genres.Chapter Six is conclusion. The research result shows us, compared to the traditional teaching method, applying Thematic Theory in Continuing Education learners’reading comprehension teaching will improve the learners’reading comprehension ability obviously, especially, for the accuracy. Moreover, the research will make a deep and long positive influence on the learners’thinking way of discourse comprehending. But this study is a tentative attempt to apply Thematic Theory in teaching Continuing Education learners’English reading teaching. The Thematic Theory also can be applied in other aspects, such as, listening and writing, etc.