A Contrastive Study Of Themes And Thematic Progression Patterns In English Argumentative Writings By American And Chinese Students

As one of the four basic skills in learning English, writing can reflect how well a language learner has mastered the language. A good writer should maintain the logicality and cohesion of his or her writing in content and form after getting a sound mastery of basic grammar knowledge of a language. There are many problems in Chinese English learners’ writings, such as lack of logicality in content, incoherence in meaning and monotone in sentence structure. In the framework of Theme Theory and Thematic Progression Theory, this essay tends to find out the similarities and differences of the application of Themes and Thematic Progression Patterns in Chinese students’ argumentative writings and American students’ argumentative writings, with the hope of figuring out the causes to the problems mentioned above.The concepts of Theme and Rheme are first proposed by one of the outstanding Prague linguists Vitem Mathesius in 1939. Then in 1974, Danes puts forward the concept of Thematic Progression. It is also Danes who raised the notion of Thematic Progression which means the comprehensive and successive correlation of sentences in a discourse. He holds that the organization of information in sentences should follow certain rules. In recent years, the theory of Theme and Thematic Progression has been widely used by scholars both from home and abroad as one of the important theories in researching the coherence in discourse.In order to make a close study of similarities and differences of the choices of Themes and Thematic Progressions in Chinese English learners’ writings and American native speaker students’ writings, this essay randomly chose 20 writings separately from the corpus of WECCL and LOCNESS and made a contrastive study.This essay intends to finds out the similarities and differences in this two groups of writings and the causes which accounts for these differences. After careful analysis, it comes to the conclusion as follows:1. In the choice of Themes, compared to American students’writings, the Chinese students’writings use more Multiple Themes, Marked Themes and Interpersonal Themes.2. In the application the Thematic Progression Patterns, three most often applied Thematic Progression Patterns in both of the two groups are:Parallel Thematic Progression Patterns, Continuous Progression Patterns and Concentrated Progression Patterns. And the percentages of both groups of the mostly used Thematic Progression Patterns are almost the same. However, by taking a closer study, the author of this essay finds out that in Chinese students’writing, the writers tend to overuse the personal pronouns as the Themes, such as "I", "we", "they" and etc. At the same time, the Chinese students write more short sentences with simple structures. There are more sentences which lack effective Thematic Progression Patterns between the former and latter sentences. Compared to American students’writings, those of the Chinese students’are loosely composed and are comparatively incoherent.