Application Of Thematic Progression Patterns In Senior High School Students’ English Essays

Writing skills are considered to be hard to improve. A large number of scholars at home and abroad do a lot of researches on writing in terms of vocabulary, syntax and discourse coherence. Accordingly, they found that the lexical and syntax errors in students’ composition were easier to rectify in contrast to the errors in discourse coherence. Discourse coherence has long been considered as the key and difficult point in English writing teaching. And in recent years, most English teachers and scholars mainly discussed related issues from the perspective of cohesion theory, such as grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices. However, few of them study on analyzing students’ compositions based on thematic progression pattern. Under this circumstance, the writer of this paper decided to explore how to improve the coherence of English writing in senior high school students from the perspective of thematic progression pattern.The theoretical basis of this paper was the thematic theory and thematic progression patterns proposed by Halliday and Danes respectively. Altogether 106 students of grade 2 in senior high school in Hainan high school were chosen as the experimental subjects. Both qualitative and quantitative methods such as teaching experiment and questionnaires were equally taken into consideration that aimed in verifying whether it was feasible and effective to put the theory into teaching the writing class.This experiment was divided into 3 steps, firstly the Pre-Test Stage, where the author tried to have a clear picture of the students’ writing ability after the analysis of data collected from questionnaires and pre-test; secondly, the Experimental Stage, where the students were divided into experimental group and control group. Furthermore, different teaching methods were used in different groups: the experimental group was instilled with the thematic progression patterns; while the control group focused on the grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices. Finally, in the Post-Test Stage, the experimental group and the control group were retested and requested to fill in the questionnaires again in three months later. The author aimed at testing the effectiveness of teaching method based on thematic progression pattern through the contrast results between pre-test and post-test.The result of this study showed that students were more likely to get high scores andhave high interest in writing after receiving the practice guided by thematic progression pattern theory. Conversely, the thematic progression patterns used in students’ compositions became more flexible and diverse than before. There was a notable improvement in the diversity of the use of multiple theme, clausal theme, continuous thematic patterns and derived thematic patterns. Correspondingly, according to the questionnaire survey analysis,students’ interest in English writing had been enhanced. The author drew the conclusion that the thematic progression pattern training can improve the students’ writing performance and writing interest. It was feasible and effective to put the theory into teaching the writing class.The thematic progression pattern theory should be acquired by English teachers and used into high school writing teaching.