A Study On The Textual Features Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing Based On Theme-Rheme Theory And Thematic Progression Patterns

Being excellent English writers requires not only a good command of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge,but also textual knowledge to promote coherence,fluency of information,and rationality of structure.Although most senior high school students can avoid obvious vocabulary and grammar mistakes,problems such as the ambiguity of the meaning and the looseness of the structure still exist in their writings.Moreover,teachers find it challenging to make an accurate analysis and judgment of these problems,frequently resorting to vague words including “not coherent enough”,“do not flow smoothly”,etc.,to evaluate students’ writing.These problems,actually,are closely related to the concepts of Theme and thematic progression in text linguistics,which are concerned with how to arrange information appropriately and establish connections between sentences and paragraphs.Therefore,based on Theme-Rheme theory and thematic progression patterns,this study made a frequency and functional analysis of thematic structure in senior high school students’ compositions.It specifically intended to answer three research questions:(1)What are the features of the use of Theme in senior high school students’ writing?(2)What are the features of the use of thematic progression patterns in senior high school students’ writing?(3)What are the differences,if any,between students of different proficiency levels in terms of the use of Theme and thematic progression patterns in their writing?In order to answer the research questions,90 argumentative compositions written by Grade 2 students in a senior high school in Hangzhou were chosen as the research corpus,with 90 argumentative essays written by native speakers as the reference.At the main stage of the research,the text analysis method was used to mark different Theme types and thematic progression patterns in the 180 argumentative compositions.After calculating the raw numbers and proportions of each type of Theme and thematic progression patterns,the data was further analyzed by SPSS 26.0 as well as qualitative analysis method.This study found that:(1)Overall,senior high school students use more topical Themes than textual and interpersonal Themes.But compared to native speakers,they overuse temporal and contingency adjuncts as marked Themes,conjunctive adjuncts as textual Themes,and personal projecting clauses as interpersonal Themes.(2)There is a lack of and an uneven distribution of TP patterns in senior high school students’ essays.Compared to native speakers,they tend to overuse constant Theme patterns but underuse simple linear,split Theme,and split Rheme patterns.(3)Students at different proficiency levels are significantly different in using marked,textual,and interpersonal Themes.And there is a positive relationship between the use of TP Patterns and language proficiency level.Reasons for these differences and writing problems may include the disparities between Chinese and English thinking modes,students’ unfamiliarity with the writing genre,insufficient instruction on textual coherence,etc.Based on the above research findings,some corresponding suggestions are put forward.First,a comparative analysis between Chinese and English thinking modes should be incorporated into writing instruction.Second,teachers should pay more attention to explaining and distinguishing the stylistic features of different text genres when analyzing writing samples.Third,thematic progression theory could be applied to writing instruction so as to carry out explicit instruction on textual coherence.