Application Of Thematic Progression Patterns In College English Writing Teaching

English writing is an essential part of foreign language teaching, and it is the most difficult task of the four basic skills in English teaching for students. At present, English writing teaching at home focuses much on the sentences instead of the text. The weak organization and poor awareness of cohesion can be easily found in students' writing. Linguist Halliday argues that cohesion facilitates coherence of a text. However, lots of studies concern coherence from the perspective of non-structural cohesion, such as grammar and vocabulary. In systemic-functional grammar, thematic structure, information systems and cohesion are the three basic sub-systems contributing to the coherence. So, the purpose of the study is to improve the college English writing teaching from the perspective of thematic progression.The study makes Danes' thematic progression theory and Halliday's cohesion theory under the framework of systemic-functional grammar as its theoretical basis. Halliday's three semantic functions refer to ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function that are the foundation of the thematic progression. Theme is the left-most constituents of the sentence; it is the starting point of the utterance. Rheme is all the things that follow theme in the sentence, which consists of what the speaker states about. The connection and changes between theme and rheme in the first sentence and theme and rheme in the second sentence are called thematic progression. The guidance of thematic progression on English writing teaching and the present situation of writing teaching at home together produce the study hypothesis that the application of thematic progression patterns can improve the students' writing quality.In the study, the subjects are from two intact classes of grade two from Yan'an University. One is the experimental class and the other is the control class. Choosing non-English majors as the subjects of the study has its significance for non-English majors occupying a large proportion at college or even in China. The study shows that non-English majors' poor awareness of cohesion in writing needs to be further developed. The experiment analyzed 216 students' compositions in the pre-test and the post-test through SPSS. The results show that: 1) the application of thematic progression patterns can improve students' writing quality; 2) Simple theme is used more often in low-score group writing; on the contrary, multiple theme and clause theme are used more in the high-score group writing. It shows that the choice of different theme is related to the writing scores or there is a positive correlation between the quality of composition and the choice of theme; 3) High score group tends to choose different patterns in their writing which can diversifies the composition; while the low-score group chooses simple pattern more often than that of the high-score group. It shows that the choice of different patterns is related to the writing scores or there is a positive correlation between the quality of composition and the choice of patterns.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter introduces the main research and its research origin and value. The second chapter is the literature review of the similar studies at home and at abroad. The third chapter is the theoretical basis of this study, consisting of Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory and Danes' theory of thematic progression. The fourth chapter is the experimental design of the study, including research purpose, research hypothesis, the subjects, materials, procedure of the experiment, and so on. The fifth chapter is the results and discussion of the study. The last chapter is the conclusion, which briefly summarizes the main findings and its significance, the practical implications, the limitations and questions to be explored in the future.