A Study Of Thematic Features In Expository Writings By Chinese English Majors

As one of the four abilities of listening,speaking,reading and writing in English learning,writing has always been an indispensable cognitive activity.With a good command of language,writing can be used to process,produce and store information.As one of the writing genres,expository writing is a style of writing in which the main mode of expression is exposition.It is one of the most familiar genres for Chinese students whereas students still face many problems in expository writing.Apart from grammatical mistakes and limited vocabularies,students often lack coherence in their writings.In Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar,thematic structure,information structure and cohesion all contribute to discourse coherence.However,most researchers mainly focus on the grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion,but neglect another cohesive device to promote discourse coherence---thematic structure.Theme-rheme theory is an important part of systemic functional linguistics.It can be used not only to analyze the use of theme and rheme,but also to analyze the relationship between sentences,and then to analyze the text structure.From the perspective of theme-rheme theory,this thesis analyzes the thematic structure and thematic progression pattern of Chinese English majors’ expository writings.It aims to analyze the general thematic features of the 270 expository writings and find out the differences of thematic features in expository writings among high proficiency group,medium proficiency group and low proficiency group.Both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are used in this study.The thesis extracts the 270 expository writings from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Leaners(2.0)and divides them into three groups(high proficiency group,medium proficiency group and low proficiency group)according to the quality of the writings.Then the researcher annotates the thematic structure and thematic progression pattern of the expository writings and uses the tool Ant Conc3.2.1 to count the frequencies of their occurrence.Finally,the data is analyzed.This thesis reaches the following conclusions.1.The general features of thematic structure mainly include two aspects: the theme types and markedness of theme.The results of theme types indicate that simple theme has the largest proportion,followed by multiple theme,clausal theme and theme in special structures.As for the components of multiple theme,experiential theme has the largest proportion,followed by textual theme and interpersonal theme.As for the markedness of theme,students are more likely to use unmarked theme.Six patterns of thematic progression are discussed in this thesis.It is found that constant theme progression pattern is the most frequently used pattern.It is followed by simple linear progression,constant rheme progression,split rheme progression,derived-theme progression and zigzag progression.2.The differences in the use of thematic features among three groups are as follows.The results of theme types and markedness of theme indicate that there are significant differences among three groups.The students of low proficiency group tend to use more simple theme.However,the students of high proficiency group are found to use more multiple theme,clausal theme and marked theme.The patterns of constant theme progression,simple linear progression and split rheme progression are significantly different among three proficiency groups.The students of low proficiency group tend to use more constant theme progression.The simple linear progression has the dominant position in the high proficiency group and medium proficiency group.And the patterns of derived-theme progression and split rheme progression have the highest frequency in high proficiency group.On this basis,the current thesis puts forward some pedagogical implications for expository writings.On the one hand,it is proved that thematic structure and thematic progression pattern are helpful to improve the coherence and quality of English writing.Teachers should teach students how to use thematic structure and thematic progression pattern correctly in their writing.What’s more,teachers should also assist students in maintaining a balance in the choice of theme types,the components of multiple theme and markedness of theme.In addition,teachers’ classroom teaching should be more appropriate to students’ language proficiency.On the other hand,students should understand the differences of thematic structure and thematic progression pattern and apply theme-rheme theory to expository writings.The perception of thematic differences enables students to realize their own deficiencies in information organization,thus creating well-organized and coherent expository writings.In addition,students can use the theories and results of the research to form a new perspective to analyze the texts.Therefore,students’ writing can be improved as a whole.