EFL students in China have difficulty in identifying different genres and understanding well of texts when they are doing reading comprehension in TEM 4 which is an English proficiency test for English major college students in China. Those students have a common sense that the key of reading comprehension is to develop the quantity of vocabulary and analyse grammatical structure of each sentence. The article provides a functional analysis briefing on interpersonal and thematic analysis on the basis of theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse reading materials from TEM 4 in order to help English major students in China have a good understanding and effective reading strategy when they do the reading comprehension. On the other hand, students learning from these analytical tools and process may have more grammatical awareness on identifying clauses and thematic relations across different reading genres.
Keywords: EFL reading, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), functional analysis
