Thematic Structures In English Argumentative Writings: A Contrastive Study

Writing is an important skill for an English learner to cultivate during the process of language learning. A good writer should not only have a good command of grammar, but also can make his composition coherent in both structure and content. Therefore writing well is not an easy task. At present, Chinese college students are facing lots of problems in their writing, such as, incoherent text, monotonous sentence pattern, unclear topic and so on. How to solve the problems? The thematic theory may give us some inspirations.The notion of Theme was introduced by Mathesius, founder of Prague School, as early as 1939 and has been developed by the members of the Prague school since then. M.A.K. Halliday inherits the notions put forward by the Prague school but has made fundamental enrichments and modifications. Thematic structure refers to the organizational pattern of Theme and Rheme, with Theme always at the beginning of a sentence. Generally, a text consists of many sentences, thus a coherent text should require the Theme and Rheme in the following sentences have some connection with those in the former ones. This connection is realized through thematic progression. The analysis of thematic structure can help us understand how the text should be organized and developed, and how the speaker conveys messages through the organization of discourse. Therefore the relation between thematic structure and writing is quite close.In this study thirty-two English argumentative essays written by Chinese college students and five argumentative essays written by native English speakers are compared in the framework of Functional Grammar. The study intends to find out the major differences in thematic structures in argumentative essays written by Chinese college students and by native English speakers and provide some useful information for the teaching of English writing. To serve the above objectives, two questions are raised. (1) What are the differences between the thematic structures found in Chinese college students'argumentative essays and those found in English native speaker'argumentative essays? (2) What are the factors causing these differences?Through the contrastive study, it is found that there are some significant differences in thematic structure between the argumentative essays written by Chinese college students and by native English speakers. On the choice of Theme, Chinese college students use more multiple Themes, interpersonal Themes and marked Themes; native English speakers use more simple Themes and textual Themes. On thematic progression pattern, Chinese college students prefer Continuity pattern; native English speakers prefer Constant Theme pattern. On consistent Macro-Theme and Hyper-Theme, Chinese college students apply less consistent Macro-Themes and Hyper-Themes; native English speakers can always keep consistent between their Macro-Themes and Hyper-Themes. Different thought pattern and first language interference are the main reasons for the above differences.The study is of pedagogical significance in helping both teachers and students realize the importance of textual metafunction and in enhancing the coherence in students'composition. It also provides some strategies to strengthen students'application of thematic structure.