Theme And Thematic Progression Pattern In English Narrative And Expository Text

Deep text interpretation is the basis and guarantee for effective teaching design and implementation.Only through deep text interpretation can teachers design effective teaching activities to help students comprehensively comprehend textual content,master and then apply textual knowledge in the learning process.Comprehensively analyzing textual information organization and structure is an important part of deep text interpretation.Comparative analysis and induction about constructive features of different text types can help teachers accumulate more textual structural schemas and much experience on the interpretation about textual structure.Theme-rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Pattern are the foci of contemporary text linguistics.In recent years,more and more scholars have affirmed the important role of Theme-rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Pattern in describing and interpreting textual construction and internal information organization.Theme-rheme Theory provides guidance to segment a text into several information starting points and their following main information,and Thematic Progression Pattern further reveals how themes and rhemes are combined to achieve cohesion and coherence of textual content and structure through repetition and transformation.Different theme types and thematic progression patterns(TP patterns)have different functions for construction of textual micro and macro structure.Different types of text formed by the combination of various theme types and TP patterns show similarities and differences in textual structure.In previous studies,scholars have proved strong explanatory power of Theme-rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Pattern for textual structure and textual information organization,and some correlations are found between theme types and TP patterns,and text types.And combining analysis about these two correlations can further reflect characteristics of textual information organization.Until now,scholars mostly employed Thematic Progression Pattern or Theme-rheme Theory to analyze textual features of written materials of single text typebut rarely combined these two theories to analyze textual micro and macro organization characteristics.Therefore,this research has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it applies Theme-rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Pattern to analyze textual organization characteristics of narrative and expository texts,which further develops their explanatory power in textual analysis.Practically,the research results about the influence of theme types and TP patterns on textual structure construction can provide teachers with some guidance for the interpretation about English literal materials,inspire teachers to apply textual analysis theories to help students grasp textual knowledge and improve reading comprehension,and help teachers guide students to create particular written texts and properly express writing intentions by appropriately designing textual information organization.The research questions include:(1)What relationships exist between distribution of theme types and construction of textual micro structure in narrative and expository text samples?(2)What relationships exist between distribution of thematic progression patterns and construction of textual macro structure in narrative and expository text samples?(3)What similarities and differences about textual structure are found between narrative and expository text type? This research mainly adopts research methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis,with Theme-rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Pattern as theoretical bases,systematically concludes Halliday's theme types and eight thematic progression patterns summarized from research results of F·Danes,Xu Shenghuan and Huang Yan as analytical framework to analyze NMET reading material.Nowadays,senior high school English textbooks choose reading materials that contain diverse text types among which narrative and expository texts are the main text types.Moreover,reading comprehension materials of NMET are mainly narrative and expository texts.Due to high reliability and validity of NMET,and in order to ensure the validity of research results,this study uses same quantity of narrative and expository texts in English reading materials from Year 2015 to Year 2019 as samples to analyze similarities and differences about the selection and distribution of theme types and thematic progression patterns between the two text types.And based on these similarities and differences,it then explores the influence of theme types and thematic progression patterns on textual structure construction by combining analysisabout writing purposes of these two text types.There are three main findings in this study.Firstly,theme type distribution has some influence on textual micro structure construction: single group theme subtype of simple theme helps to achieve consistency of referential relationships,identify main characters or objects of the text,indicate small topics and emphasize situation information;in group complex theme subtype,noun and nominal group with their modifiers give more accurate description about the starting point of a clause or a sentence,and also indicate clues about small topics;noun,nominal,prepositional and adverbial group complex have two kinds of expressive effect: situation description and exemplification;textual+topical element belonging to multiple theme helps identify and infer logical relations among sentences and small topics;compound clause and dependent clause theme subtype of clausal theme often present background information,and reflect simultaneity and situationality of event and action occurrence;dependent clause theme subtype with modifying functions also emphasizes logical relation about the occurrence of events,and identifies small topic.Nominalization,predicated theme and marked theme all provide rhetorical effects,and nominalization also identifies small topics.Secondly,thematic progression pattern distribution has some influence on textual macro structure construction: simple linear pattern,parallel pattern,concentrated pattern and continuous theme pattern help organize several small topics into a subtopic about the text theme when they are employed solely or in combination.Besides,when they involve a chain which crosses two paragraphs,these two paragraphs can be linked as a subtopic,or transitional paragraph can be found between the two paragraphs.Derived rheme pattern and derived theme pattern construct information about subtopics and both two patterns reflect various classification about superordinate concepts.Thirdly,narrative and expository text have some similarities and differences in textual structure:(1)in terms of similarities,for textual micro structure,single group,noun and noun group with modifiers in group complex,nominalization and dependent clause theme subtypes,and marked theme all identify textual small topics;group complex,nominalization,predicated theme and clausal theme all provide background information and elaborately describe objects;textual+topical element and dependent clause theme subtypes are employed to identify logical semantic relations;besides,single grouptheme subtype can help achieve consistency of referential relations and identify textual objects,and group complex theme subtype also has some expressive effects,for example,exemplification.For textual macro structure,simple linear pattern,parallel pattern,concentrated pattern and continuous theme pattern all organize several small topics into a subtopic,and transitional paragraph may exist when a chain of these four thematic progression patterns cross two paragraphs.(2)in terms of differences,for textual micro structure,in narrative text,nominalization,marked theme and clausal theme have larger distribution,which indicates that structural arrangements including character image emphasis,referent consistency,situation description and emphasis about logical relations among event occurrence and personal actions are often employed in narrative text type;and in expository text,group complex and textual+topical element theme subtypes have larger distribution,which reflects that expository text emphasizes more about the employment of explanatory device including exemplification and logical relations.For textual macro structure,simple linear pattern has the largest distribution in narrative text whereas parallel patten,in expository text;besides,in expository text,derived rheme pattern accounts for more proportion and derived theme pattern is only distributed in expository text.These differences indicate the emphasis of the two text types on structural arrangement of subtopics.Based on the above findings,this paper finally puts forward some suggestions with a view to benefit teachers' text interpretation,reading and writing teaching,which ultimately promotes effective proceeding of teachers' teaching design and implementation.