| In people's minds, the view of"the Earth Village"has gradually become brighter and clearer on account of convenient transport and flourish telecommunication combined with the rising popularity of computers. English, as an international language, carries more and more weight in the aspect of communications. Around the world, for instance, it is becoming more and more urgent for people to learn and use English, with the coming of Net Period. In addition, accompanied by China's entry into the WTO and the further implementing of"Open-door"policy, the issue related to the increasing demand of foreign language brains has been the focus of the society. It is widely acknowledged that English learning requires long-time effort which emphasizes the cultivation of competence consisting of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. And as far as most foreign language learners are concerned, the first difficulty in language learning is writing. It is true that there are many factors affecting writing competence, such as language barriers, the influence of mother tongues, the lack of thinking and organizing competence and the like. Among these, the lack of organizing competence should be emphasized most since it can be compared to the bones, propping up and linking up the frameworks and contents of articles. However, this aspect is usually neglected in writing teaching and researches; many scholars study it from the angle of coherence and cohesion while few study it on the basis of the theory of Theme-rheme.Due to the above factors, based on the present situation of college English writing, this study intends to focus on analyzing how to apply the theory of Theme-rheme to writing which is believed to be able to produce an important influence and efficient guide on the logical combination of English compositions, so as to give some advice on how to improve writing teaching.The general framework of the thesis consists of three main parts: Firstly, it reviews the origin and development of the theory of Theme-rheme at home and abroad, as well as the current situation of domestic scholars'studies on English writing. Furthermore, this study pays more attention to the analysis of the theory put forward by K·Boost and improved by other linguists, which includes the definitions of theme and rheme (Theme, at the head of a sentence, is the starting-point of Information; rheme, following it, acts as describing and illustrating Theme), theme classification, thematic progression and so on.Secondly, with the help of common statistics ways and SPSS software, the author chooses at random and analyzes compositions written by seniors majoring in English in Shandong Normal University so that it studies the current situation of college students'organizing competence in writing (The total number of collected compositions is 79). Meanwhile, four tasks, during the process of analysis, need to be finished. Based on the theory of Theme-rheme, they include offering a new model analysis pattern of textual arrangement, studying the collected compositions, comparing good and poor models and analyzing the relationship between genres and thematic progression patterns.Thirdly, the thesis comes to a conclusion and the results obtained can be as follows: (1) the theory of Theme-rheme plays an important role in a mixture of coherence and cohesion, as well as the logical combination of compositions during the process of English writing; (2) the thematic progression should be highlighted and widely applied in English writing.Meanwhile, the thesis has certain theoretical and practical significance. On one hand, to some extent, it can make complementation to the researches concerning the lack of organizing competence in writing; on the other hand, it offers a new perspective—the integration of the theory of Theme-rheme into English writing, so as to improve writing.Thus, it is sincerely hoped that the present study can shed light on college English writing teaching and writing researches. |
