The Influence Of Thematic Progression On The College Students' Writing Coherence

Studies on"theme"and"rheme"were sparked off by Henri Weil in the year of 1844 (Weil, 1978). Since then, many linguists, particularly those from the Prague School, have done many studies in such a field. The appearance of thematic structure and thematic progression has opened a new field for language study, especially for discourse analysis. Some language educators have tried to apply thematic structure and thematic progression patterns to foreign language teaching; and some of them have already made preliminary achievements in discourse analysis and reading comprehension. Based on these achievements, linguists began to make research on thematic progression and textual coherence. They assume that teaching of thematic progression might exert positive influence on improving the coherent degree of English writings. However, up to now, most studies are just staying at the theoretic level; few have come to practice. Even to those concerning practice, the introduction of experimental methods is too general to guide teaching practice; and the experimental methods are to some extend not scientific enough so that the result would lack reliability.Macroscopically speaking, the significance of this research lies in two aspects. One is the discrepancy between theory and practice. That is to say, theory sometimes is an unattainable ideal or a set of postulates which are not applicable in the harsh world of reality. Theory needs feedback from practice to press itself toward the goal of a viable, integrated theory. This is also a perspective of philosophy. The other is that thematic progression patterns closely correlate with people's logic thinking process. Therefore, to apply TP patterns to English writing teaching, actually is to enforce the cultivation of students'logic thinking abilities.Microscopically speaking, this research intends to address the following three questions:1) Will the teaching and learning of thematic progression patterns exert any influence on Chinese college students'English writing performance, in terms of their total scores on the composition and scores on the coherence of their...