A Study Of The Effects Of Thematic Progression On Students' Writing Performance At Senior High School

Writing is an important measure of students' language level,in addition to an important language skill.It plays an important role in the National College Entrance Examination.However,most students find themselves weak in writing as they cannot get satisfying scores in writing.The reason for it is that they usually attach much importance to vocabulary and grammar but pay little attention to sentence structures and discourse coherence.Though there are not many obvious mistakes in vocabulary or grammar,there is a lack of rhythm and changes of sentence patterns,resulting in the raters feeling puzzled and bored to read students' compositions.Therefore,it is an urgent task for senor high school teachers to improve students' writing.Thematic progression pattern,one essential aspect of thematic theory that focuses on discourse analysis,can help us understand how the text develops and how the speaker conveys messages.It has drawn much attention from linguists,such as Hu Zhuanglin and Zhu Yongsheng to conduct some related studies.They draw the conclusion that TP patterns influence students' writing performance positively.Unfortunately,the conclusion is based on theoretical research.Besides,according to recent literature,there is little research concerning the application of TP patterns to writing teaching in senior high school.Hence,it needs exploring whether TP patterns can improve senior high school students' writing performance effectively.This thesis tries to put TP patterns into practice in senior high school with the aim of improving students' writing performance,and it mainly deals with the following two questions:(1)What is the effect of thematic progression on English writing performance among senior high school students? And in which aspect(s)can students get the best improvement,complexity,accuracy,or fluency?(2)What is the students' perception of the application of thematic progression to English writing? And is there any correlation between students' perception and their writing performance?96 students from Nantong No.2 Middle School participate in the experiment.They are from Class 2(the control class)and Class 5(the experimental class)in Grade Two.The number of students in each class is 48.Students in Class 2 are trained in the product approach while students in Class 5 receive the instruction of applying TP patterns to writing.Instruments used in the experiment consist of tests,questionnaires and interviews.Materials for the pre-test and the post-test are adapted from the National College Entrance Examination(Jiangsu Province).After the tests,SPSS 21.0 is used to analyze the data.After receiving a semester' training,students in EC perform better in writing than those in CC.Conclusions are drawn as follow: Firstly,the application of TP patterns to writing can improve students' writing performance,especially complexity and fluency.Secondly,students have a positive perception of the application of TP patterns to writing and they prefer the writing-teaching method based on TP patterns to the product approach.Besides,there is a significant correlation between students' perception of the application of TP patterns to writing and students' writing performance.Although there are some limitations because of the limited number of subjects and the short duration of the experiment,there is no doubt that applying TP patterns to writing is a practical and effective way to improve students' writing performance.