| On the increase of cultural exchange, news becomes indispensable to people's daily life. As for the English learners in China, they could widen the vocabulary as well as understand the changing world through reading English news. Therefore, it is essential for them to know the news features, especially how news texts are structured, which could help the English learners learn English in an effective way.As one research mainstream in linguistics, textual analysis has played a crucial part in the textual understanding. And in the history of its development, Systematic Functional Grammar (SFG), put forward by Halliday, has been playing an important role. Halliday pays more attention to the functions of clause, especially the clause as message, which is realized by Thematic Structure (T-R structure). Thematic Progression Pattern (TPP), put forward by Czech scholar Danes in 1974, is extended by T-R structure, and it has close relations with textual coherence and inner structural development. In order to understand the application of TPP to the analysis of English news, the author randomly selects 20-political news & 20-entertainment news from the China View and People Daily websites. Based on the T-R structure and textual coherence in SFG, the present research makes a comparative study of TPP in political and entertainment news by the means of quantitative and qualitative approaches. On the one hand, to find out how TPP performs in the two types of news; on the other hand, by using the knowledge of TPP, to help English learners gain the best reading & writing for any kind of texts.In order to accurately analyze the influence of SFG on TPP analysis, before telling the similarities and differences between political and entertainment news, the author first excludes the news subjective and objective factors having no more relations with TPP—news writer's intention and news structure, and then takes the elements for thematic structure and textual coherence to analyze. As a result, the research represents that political and entertainment news share the same overall Occurrence Frequency (OF) of TPP; some TPP, however, is different, as shown below.ⅰ. The occurrence frequency of TP with a constant Theme in entertainment news is 10% more than that in political news;ii. The occurrence frequency of TP with a cross thematic progression in political news is 10% more than that in entertainment news; ⅲ. The two genres nearly share the same occurrence frequency of TP with a simple linear progression, TP with a combined Theme and Rheme and TP with a coordinate progression;ⅳ. The two genres shares the same total number of the occurrence frequency of TPP. These are the analysis results, and the reasons resulting in the results are listed in the following:Firstly, the number of lexical has influence on the information column that provided in the two genres, and the same number of lexical consistency means the two genres nearly share the same information column or information structure, which causes the two genres news share the same total number of the OF of TPP.Secondly, to arouse the readers'interest, any news usually comes straight to point. Therefore, the writers often take the subject as the theme. Thus, TP with a constant theme in both political and entertainment news covers large proportion. On the other hand, because the total number of clauses in entertainment news is more than that in political news, the occurrence frequency of TP with a constant Theme in entertainment news is more than that in political news;Thirdly, from the view of the relations between textual coherence and TPP, generally speaking, the total number of coherence relations should be equal to the total number of occurrence frequency of TPP, but in the present research, the result is not like this, but the difference is not distinct. Just because of this, TP with a combined Theme and Rheme is the same in the two news types.From the above all, we can see the relations between TPP and genres not only enrich the understanding of the functions of TPP, but also build the crucial part of TPP in inner textual development. Therefore, in the process of study, the author suggests the teaching, especially reading and writing, apply the knowledge of TPP, in order to make learners improve cognitive to textual coherence and finally achieve the goal to improve the coherence in the process of reading as well as writing.
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