The Impact Of Thematic Progression Patterns On English Textual Coherence Of Adult Learners

Based on M. A. K. Halliday's framework of thematic structure and F. Dane?'thematic progression patterns, the present study carries out an experiment to probe what impact the instruction of Thematic progression patterns might have on English textual coherence of adult learners in China. The research questions of this study are: 1) Will the instruction of Theme-Rheme theory and thematic progression (TP) patterns bring any positive impact on adult learners'English writing in terms of textual coherence? 2) To what extent will the instruction of the six TP patterns respectively improve textual coherence in the learners'writing?The subjects used in the study were two classes of the night school at College of Continuing Education, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They were exposed to two different ways of writing, the experimental group to thematic structure and thematic progression patterns while the control group to the traditional approach. After the experiment, paired samples t-tests were carried out to test the differences of textual coherences between the pre-test and post-test in the two classes. In the meantime, weekly reports from 6 subjects in the experimental group were collected and analyzed.The results of the present study revealed that, with the consciousness of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns in mind, the adult students in the experimental group improved significantly in terms of their coherence scores and total scores in the post-test. The improvement varied with the application of the six patterns, though. The differences were significant with the parallel pattern, the linear pattern, the concentrated pattern and the derived pattern while no significant amelioration was seen in their use of the other two patterns, i.e. the crossing pattern and the alternating pattern. On the basis of the above results, the present study arrives at the conclusion that the introduction of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns may bring positive impact on adult learners'writing. Therefore, it is suggested that Thematic structure and Thematic progression patterns be introduced into the language teaching to adult learners.