An Empirical Study Of Applying The Theme And Thematic Progression Theory To College Students' English Writing

Writing is the productive skill in the written form and great importance has been attached to it. Linguists both at home and abroad has investigated this skill for a long time and made great achievements, such as the product model, the process model and the interaction model, etc. however, many scholars and teacher find that a lot of common problems exist in students'compositions. One of the problems is that the text has a loose structure and confusing information organization. Taking this problem into consideration, this paper introduced the theme and thematic progression patterns (thematic structure) which was used to understand how to organize and precede a text in a logical way and how the information distributed in a text. In this research, the theme and theme structure theory was applied to the teaching of English writing in order to find out whether it can improve the English writing ability.This study exerts great effort to apply the theme and thematic progression theory to the teaching of English writing and aims to find out the effect of the theory on writing. On the basis of the related studies by experts and learners on this theory, this paper concludes six major types, which will be adopted in the following research (The constant theme pattern, the linear progression pattern, the constant rheme pattern, the split rheme pattern, The derived themes pattern and the intersection pattern).This study was carried out in the English department of Linfen Teachers'College. There are two natural classes with 32 and 34 students respectively. They are all sophomore English majors. They can be treated as two parallel classes. The first class will be considered as the controlled class (CC) which will be taught by the general teaching method, while the second class will be the experimental class (EC) which instructed with the theme and thematic progression theory. The subjects were asked to fulfill two writing assignments during the experiment period and in the end, the experimental class need to fill out a questionnaireAn experiment with two assignments and a questionnaire are employed in this paper. This study will analyze the data obtained through the experiment and processed by SPSS 11.5. The results suggested that: (1) The theme and thematic progression theory can be employed as a teaching method to improve the students'writing ability. (2) The theme and thematic progression theory can promote the students'involvement in writing and their awareness of the importance of information organization in writing.In writing class of English majors, it is suggested that a combination of the traditional teaching method and the theory of systemic functional grammar on text should be employed to improve students'writing ability more effectively.