A Study On The Application Of Thematic Progression Pattern To English Reading Comprehension In Junior High School

English reading,as an important skill for the students,is an indispensable means of communication.In the traditional teaching methods,the students almost focus on the study of words and grammar instead of the relationship between the words and paragraphs in a text.How to change the students' learning habit and improve their reading proficiency in English has been a hot discussion among many linguistics and teachers in recent years.Thematic progression pattern is an important means of analyzing discourse framework formed on the basis of the thematic theory and the relationship between theme and rheme in systemic functional grammar.The application of Thematic progression pattern can not only help the readers understand the overall structure of the article but also help them select effective information.There is a very close connection between reading and the thematic progression pattern.This paper discusses the application of thematic progression pattern in English reading teaching in order to explore an effective English reading teaching method in junior high school for teachers and students.Two research questions are as follow:1.Can the application of thematic progression pattern increase students' reading strategies in English reading?2.Can the application of thematic progression pattern improve students' reading achievements?The experiment used questionnaires,tests and interviews as research instruments.Sixty students from two classes in No.27 Middle School in Benxi were selected as participants of the experiment.The students in two classes had the similar educational background and English proficiency.One class is the experiment class(EC)and the other is the control class(CC).The English reading teaching method based on thematic progression pattern was used in EC while the traditional method to English reading teaching was adopted in CC.After 16 weeks' reading teaching,the data of the questionnaire and test are analyzed by SPSS19.0 to answer the questions of the experimental study.The following conclusions are obtained after the experiment: 1.Thematic progression pattern can improve students' reading comprehension strategies.2.The application of thematic progression can improve students' English reading comprehension achievements.Although there are some limitations in the research,it is proved that it is beneficial to apply the thematic progression pattern to reading teaching in junior high school.