Study Of Thematic Progression Patterns On Argumentative Essays And Its Pedagogical Implications For EFL Writing

Writing, as the practice of the comprehensive English skill, is one of the difficult devices to be manipulated for English learners, for it is the embodiment of the communicative abilities. Writers often meet with difficult problems in the process of writing such as where to start with, how to connect adjacent sentences or paragraphs and so on. The deep root lies in that although the learners may master the syntax of the target language, the want of the cognition arid sensibility towards the text structure and the organization rules of it may also lead to the failure of communication. As such is the case, that what it is that has to be learnt in order to produce effective written products have become the main concern of English teachers.Based on the Thematic Progression Patterns given by Halliday, Danes and Pro. Xu shenghuan, for studying Argumentative essays' features, this paper studied 30 composition samples from the sophomore of Dalian University of Technology. After study, we find that Theme is an aspect of language, which looks likely to yield useful information in this connection. Theme does, appear to be a possible problem area in EFL writing and, as such, it would seem worth keeping on further investigation.