On The Application Of Thematic Structure And Information Structure In Junior Middle School English Listening Teaching

With the increasing exchange between China and foreign countries,English listening is becoming more and more important.The New Curriculum Standard in 2012 has put forward detailed and specific requirements on English listening at each stage.New teaching material has also put listening training onto the agenda.Improving students' English listening ability has been paid more attention by most English teachers.However,according to the questionnaire survey,junior middle school students are weak in English listening.In listening,students can not use their knowledge to accurately understand the listening materials which leads to low listening ability of middle school students.To solve this problem,domestic and foreign scholars have done some research on English listening teaching,the previous research shows that the application of textual function in English teaching can help students improve students English ability.But most of research is concerned with college English listening teaching,seldom with middle school English listening teaching.Textual function is one of the three metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics.It refers to the function of organizing linguistic component into discourse,includes thematic structure,information structure and cohesion.As for thematic structure,theme is often the first constituent of the sentence,that is the topic of conversation.Rheme is the interpretation and description of the theme.Information structure is the structure of information units,which is the interaction of given information and new information.However,due to limited space,this paper only applies thematic structure and information structure into junior middle school English listening teaching.Thematic structure and information structure are helpful for middle school students understanding how a text is organized and information is distributed in a text.Therefore,this paper tries to apply thematic structure and information structure theory into middle school English listening teaching to improve students' English listening ability.Based on the thematic structure and the instruction of the information structure,can English listening ability of junior high school students be improved? This is the research question of this paper.In order to solve this question,this paper focuses on how to apply the theory of thematic structure and information structure into junior middle school English listening teaching.Then,this paper takes two classes from junior middle school in Zhumadian City as the research objects,and makes a specific teaching experiment to find whether applying thematic structure and information structure theory into junior middle school English listening teaching can help middle school students improve their listening ability to some degree.One class is an experimental class,the other one is a control class.The author holds two listening tests for experimental class(EC)and control class(CC)before and after the experiment,then comparing and analyzing the results of the two tests.The results show that listening level of two classes after experiment is obviously different.Experimental class students make greater progress.It proves that the application of thematic structure and information structure theory in junior middle school English listening teaching can improve middle students' English listening ability to some degree.