A Study Of The Application Of Thematic Progression To English Reading Class In Senior High School

English reading can be regarded as one of the important skills to evaluate language proficiency. With the new reform of college entrance examination in English, more and more attention has been paid to students’ reading skills. It is significant for students to make an improvement in English, especially in reading. In order to deal with the main existing problems in English reading teaching, the thesis represents how to cultivate and improve students’ reading ability.In recent years, many scholars apply different theories to reading comprehension. The thematic progression pattern, as one of the significant theories, emphasizes the textual structure from discourse level, which is different from traditional teaching method. With the help of relevant research results, the thesis mainly tries to apply thematic progression pattern to reading class in senior high school. 95 students from two random classes are selected from one Senior High School, Grade 1 to conduct the experiment. The thematic progression pattern is conducted in one of the classes named experimental class, while traditional reading method is taught in the other class named controlled class. The period of the experiment is one semester. At the beginning and end of the experiment, questionnaires are used to check reading skills and techniques students employed and reading tests are carried out to prove whether students in experimental class have got greater improvement in reading ability than those in controlled class. Finally, all the data is collected and analyzed by the software SPSS 17.0. The results present the effectiveness of applying thematic progression pattern to reading comprehension.