Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
Higher education has developed vigorously these decades in China, more andmore high school graduates choose to further their education in university or college.Compared with the academic atmosphere of university, college especially vocationalcollege provides opportunities for students to learn practical knowledge and skillsrapidly. And these knowledge and skills meet the requirement of our society and willbe put into practice at a fast speed. For this reason, vocational colleges becomepopular these years. As an essential component of higher education, vocationalcollege has an important position in China. As an essential component of teachingsubjects, English plays a vital role in vocational college education. English gets moreand more attention because it has great significance to everyone, not only as alanguage itself, but also as a communicative tool and information acquiring way.English reading, as the primary means of access to information, requires extraattention from vocational college students. Though great achievements have beenmade in English reading teaching, the current situation of English reading is not sooptimistic in vocational college. English teaching especially on reading has itscharacteristics in vocational college. The traditional reading model is used in Englishteaching in most vocational colleges. Vocabulary and grammar have important placesin this model. Teachers teach hard, students learn hard and lots of exercises are doneduring and after class, but the scores and proficiency of students in reading have noclear improvement. What’s more, plenty of students begin to lose interest in reading.The reading teaching comes to a deadlock. The students’ English reading proficiencyaffects not only their test scores in college but also their job opportunities and laterspecific work.
……………
1.2 Significance of the study
Without doubt, Reading is always one of the most important skills in Englishlearning, if not the most. Reading is a handy, intuitive and common way to acquireinformation; what’s more, the information can be selected, not like listening. But thetraditional reading model used in teaching mainly focuses on language points learning,word-to-word translation but not the whole grasp of text. For the purpose of enrichingthe theoretical and practical study of English reading teaching, the study is conducted.This study is to explore the role of application Theme-Rheme theory to readingteaching and it is conducted to find out whether students’ English reading proficiencywill be improved through teaching under the guidance of Theme-Rheme theory.Besides, the following three questions are answered in this thesis: 1). What is thesituation of non-English majors’ English reading in vocational college? 2). Can theapplication of Theme-Rheme theory improve students’ reading proficiency? 3). Canthe application of Theme-Rheme theory improve the scores of all kinds of readingtasks in vocational college teaching?
………………
Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Theme-Rheme theory
More than 2017 years ago, the ancient Greek scholar Plato proposes that onoma(naming) and rhema (saying) as two important components of human thought’s basicunit. It may inspire the later researchers somehow, but till 1844, a German-bornFrench scholar, Henri Weil (1844), the founde，英语论文题目，英语论文题目
|
