| Writing, as the practice of one's comprehensive proficiency in a language, is one of the four most important skills in learning a foreign language. In recent years, in the field of foreign language teaching, a lot of researches on how to improve students'writing ability have been done, which cover almost every aspect of students'writing. However, in the present teaching activities, problems like the impropriate connection between sentences, loose textual structure, disorder in structure, and lack of unity are very common and there are no effective solutions to be applied. In the traditional teaching method, the correct use of words and grammar are emphasized all the time, the ignorance of coherence makes it the biggest problem in writing teaching.In order to solve this problem, the present study attempts to apply thematic progression to the teaching of college English writing. There are many researches done on thematic progression, among which Danes'contribution is prominent, he is the first one who proposes this theory and summarizes the most common patterns of thematic progression. Thematic progression is closely related to the information structure in a text, it can be adopted to analyze the information flow and semantic relation of a text, by which the structure and coherence in the text can be displayed. The present thesis applies this theory into studying college English writings.The aim of the study is to investigate the differences among CET-6 compositions in using patterns of thematic progression, then testify the importance of thematic progression in improving coherence in students'writings, thus prove that it is an effective means in college English teaching. In order to achieve this aim, the author first randomly chooses 40 CET-6 compositions as subjects from Chinese Learners English Corpus, the data are representative and authoritative, and then analyzes the patterns of thematic progression in these compositions, the steps are as follows: first, divide 40 compositions into two groups according to their scores, and label the Theme and Rheme in each clause based on the definition and classification about Theme by Halliday. Second, review the researches on patterns of thematic progression aboard and home, and propose the analytical framework of the study, then find out the TP patterns employed in each composition. Finally, summarize the rate of total TP patterns and the rate of each TP pattern in each group, then compare the results of the two groups and analyze the differences and similarities.The result of the study shows that although the outline of the composition in CET-6 is given, how to reasonably arrange the structure and coherently connect one clause with another is still a big problem in students'writings. Although the problem of incoherence has been found out in both groups, problems like loose structure, illogical in meaning, no semantic relation between clauses are much more common in the group with low scores, the main reason lies in the low rate of employment of different TP patterns, nearly half of the writings in this group have no thematic progression.The study proves that thematic progression plays an essential part in textual structure and coherence, which can provide suggestions to the present teaching of college English writing. Thematic progression is easy to manage and learn, if we can combine the theory with the traditional teaching method, teachers can not only help students to get rid of the errors in grammar and spelling, but also help them to produce coherent writings with reasonable and logical structure, the combination of both methods will be more effective in the teaching of college English writing. |
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