A Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis Of The Application Of Theme And Thematic Progression Patterns In College English Writing Teaching

This study is a systemic functional linguistic analysis of the application of Theme and Thematic Progression (TP) Patterns in college English writing teaching. The theories of Theme and Thematic Progression are considered important methods which can be widely applied in many aspects of foreign language teaching. Writing teaching is one of the important field in which those theories can be applied. For most Chinese English teachers, writing teaching is no doubt the work with greatest difficulties but little fruit, it is still far beyond satisfaction of both students and teachers. CET-4is now regarded as a national examination; it has already become the final goal which college non-majors make great efforts to achieve, and also an important method to which teachers can refer in daily writing teaching. Thus the analysis of sample writings of CET-4will bring lots of benefits not only for passing the exam, but for daily writing teaching. The purpose of the study is to provide college English teachers with new angel and new methods in writing teaching.This thesis combines qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the thematic choices and TP Patterns of22sample writings from CET-4. Those samples are classified into three different genre types, argumentation, exposition and letter. Through detailed analysis and comparison, differences have been found in the application of Theme and TP Patterns in different genre types.It is found in the study that Themes can yield useful information; successful writings use various Theme types. Theme types and TP Patterns correlate with genre types. Besides, thematic choices and TP Patterns help a lot in the realization of cohesion and coherence of discourses. The application of the above mentioned theories in college writing teaching is the key part of the thesis. In this part, introduction of Theme and TP is first discussed, followed by the realization of cohesion and coherence with the help of those theories. Finally, genre teaching model is proposed. It is expected that the present study might be of some help in the practice of English writing teaching in college.