The Influence Of Thematic Progression On The College Student Writing Coherence

At present, most college students have to take part in various English tests, and writing is an important part of these tests, so many college students are trying every means to improve their writing. However, in the course of English writing teaching, it is found that some compositions are written so well that they can be read very easily. Sometimes it is an enjoyment to read these compositions. Whereas some compositions are not written so well that the readers can't finish reading them. When deploring the problem, it is found that besides the influence caused by the differences in using words and making sentences, it is the structure of the articles, especially the coherence of the articles that plays a key role in the student compositions which result in different influence among the readers. So coherence is the essential part of the writing teaching. The thesis introduces an important theory on coherence-thematic progression to have an experiment to test its effect on improving the college students' coherence in the four types of writing.Thematic Progression is an important theory of coherence put forward by Danes. Danes's important contribution to the discourse coherence analysis (Angela Downing, 1974:114) is to extend the concept of theme as point of beginning of a single sentence to that of explaining the inner development of texts. His basic assumption is that text development is represented, among other things, by thematic progression. The thematic organisation of the text is closely connected with discourse coherence or text connexity. A text is defined as text largely in terms of its semantic coherence; however, it is useful to remember, as Danes points out (Danes, 1974) that texts are not always perfect; they not only display coherence to an uneven degree, but some may be characterised as 'discontinuous'. Text connexity, in this light, is not a yes/no property but rather a more-or-less property. An awareness of the types of thematic progression expounded by Danes also raises interesting questions for language teaching pedagogy. For instance, whether student compositions might be improved as regards what is subjectively termed the 'flow' of the text, by consciously selecting certain thematic progressions (Angela Downing, 2001.5) .John M. Sunclair put forward four important sentence-sentence relations to realize the written discourse coherence in his paper Written Discourse structure in 1993 (Zhao Yongqing, 2002:19) . They are encapsulation ( ), prospection ( ), verbal echo and overlay. He points out that in a discourse every sentence-sentence relation should be one of the four relations among which the first two are often used (Zhao Yongqing, 2002:19) . Otherwise, there would be something wrong with the discourse coherence. Unlike the former method for discourse analysis, his research provides the discourse analysis explanation with rather effective and feasible methods, which are worth using for reference.The thesis consists of four parts. The first part mainly talks about the purpose of the topic selecting: to explore the influence of the thematic progression on the college English writing coherence. The second part discusses the literature review on the topic. At first, it deals with the definition of the theory the thesis applied- thematic progression. It also illustrates the application and the development of the theory. Then it talks about the definition of coherence, the theory of coherence, viewpoints of some important linguists on coherence as well as the coherence phenomenon and coherence problem in the college English writing. The third part is the theory basis. This part talks over some influential factors on coherence from the aspects of pragmatics, cooperative principles and language action. The fourth part focuses on the experiment which mainly includes the following procedures: the explanation of the theory, the application of the theory, data collection and analysis and the discussion on the results of the experiment. As it turns out, thematic progression has positive effe...