An Empirical Study Of Theme And Thematic Progression In Argumentative Writing By Chinese Non-English Majors

As one of the most particularly emphasized language skills in English learning,writing presents a language learner’s language proficiency and communicative efficiency.Unfortunately,apart from grammar mistakes and monotonous sentence patterns,there is a lack of cohesion and coherence between sentence and sentence,paragraph and paragraph,or sentences and paragraph on the discourse level.In fact,this problem is related to the way of organizing information,which concerns assigning information in the clauses correctly to either Theme or Rheme and developing the important information further in thematic progression patterns.This paper,conducted within the systemic functional theory of Theme-Rheme construct and the thematic progression theory,reports on a comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English argumentative compositions written by Chinese students of non-English majors and by native British students who have just finished A-level exam.It seeks to determine the similarities and differences of Themes and thematic progression patterns used in Chinese and British students’ English argumentative writing and discusses Chinese students’ problems with thematic choice and progression as well as the underlying reasons for their improper use.In this study,both Corpus-based Analysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis research methods are adopted,combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.Two self-created comparable corpora are built by the author,who picks out samples from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0(WECCL2.0)and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)respectively.From WECCL2.0,172 English timed argumentative compositions of grade one non-English majors with a sum of 34,171 word tokens are sampled to be compared with 60 British A-level argumentative essays,which amount to 32,857 word tokens.By means of corpus software AntConc3.2.1 which is employed to count total number of word tokens and calculate frequency of certain type of Theme as well as statistics software SPSS,utilized to conduct independent samples tests,this study yields the following important findings.The research finds that in terms of how Chinese students differ from British students in the use of Themes and thematic progression patterns,there are mainly five aspects of differences:(1)Chinese non-English majors have a tendency to overuse multiple Themes,in particular textual Themes to express internal relations among clauses;As for interpersonal Themes,Chinese students’ overuse of modal adjuncts indicates that they tend to transfer characteristics of oral dialogue into written discourse.(2)Chinese non-English majors’ compositions show a remarkable overuse of marked Themes.(3)Excessive use of structure “I think(consider,find,feel,see,believe)” results in larger number of subjective interpersonal metaphors in Chinese students’ writing.(4)Random changes in Themes and double-subject constructions lead to basic information structuring problem in Chinese students’ argumentation.(5)There is a difference in the proportion of parallel thematic progression(same Theme)and simple linear progression pattern.Chinese learners tend to overuse parallel thematic progression with same Theme,while simple linear progression pattern is the most popular thematic progression pattern in native speakers’ argumentation.There are a combination of factors attributing to the differences in thematic choices and thematic progression patterns and even thematization problems.The interference of mother tongue,different thought patterns of Eastern and Western people,insufficient knowledge of structuring thematic information in foreign language as well as inadequate language accumulation all contribute to the difficult situation for Chinese learners of English language to construct and organize native like compositions in writing process.By summarizing and analyzing the above differences,this thesis enriches the comparative study for Theme and thematic progression pattern applied in essays of argumentation,providing some advice for English argumentative writing.