Thematic Progression And Coherence In Senior Middle School English Writing

English writing is an essential part of English learning and it is a basic difficult skill for students to grasp. At present, English writing teaching in China focuses more on the sentences than the text. The weak organization and poor textual coherence can be easily found in students'writing. In linguist Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, thematic structure, information structure and cohesion are the three basic sub-systems contributing to textual coherence. However, a large number of researchers study coherence from the perspective of cohesion, such as lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. Thematic structure, which can help the coherence of discourse,is neglected to some degree. So, the research will try to study coherence based on thematic progression.The theoretical basis of the research is Halliday's thematic structure theory, Danes'thematic progression theory and coherence. Thematic structure is composed of two parts: theme and rheme. Theme is usually the beginning part, the topic of the clause and the departure of the new information. The rest part of the clause is called rheme, which is what the speaker states about. Generally speaking, every sentence has its thematic structure. Its theme and rheme are constructed and no longer changed when there is only a certain sentence. However, in the process of learning, we can find that a text is more helpful to us than a single sentence. A text is made up of more than one sentence. So the theme in the first sentence and the theme and the rheme in the second sentence, the rheme in the first sentence and the theme and the rheme in the second sentence will relate with each other, and changes will appear, therefore. Such a series of relations and changes are called thematic progression. With thematic progression between sentences, a whole text is developed and formed. In the study, the subjects are selected from Grade Two students in Qihe No.1 Middle School in Shan Dong Province. Then 30 sample compositions collected are analyzed based on thematic progression to illustrate the proper use of the thematic progression is helpful for the compositions'coherence. Based on the objective, two research questions are put forward:1) What types of basic thematic progression patterns are mainly used in the sample compositions?2) What is the difference between more coherent compositions and less coherent compositions in terms of thematic progression patterns?The research results show that: 1) There are mainly three types of basic thematic progression patterns used in the sample compositions. They are constant theme pattern, constant rheme pattern and simple linear pattern. 2) There are more basic thematic progression patterns in the more coherent compositions, especially compound patterns, which is made up of two or more than two basic patterns. And the less coherent compositions only choose one or two basic patterns. It shows that the use of the patterns is related to the coherence of discourse.The research is significant not only in that it illustrates the proper use of thematic progression is helpful for the discourse coherence but also in that the analysis of thematic progression patterns can help readers to know the organization of the text. The research can be helpful for English teachers and high school students, especially for students. The teachers can apply thematic progression to guiding English reading and writing teaching. And the students can use thematic progression to analyze the problems in their writing and know why they couldn't get high marks though they have few grammatical mistakes in their compositions..