Thematic Theory And The Teaching Of English Writing

The notions of theme and rheme was articulated by Mathesius, founder of Prague School, as early as 1939. In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, M. A. K. Halliday(1985) classifies theme into three types: simple theme, multiple themes, and clausal theme. F. Danes defined, in his book Zur Linguischen Analyseder Textstruktur, successive themes and their rhemes as thematic progression and identified four main thematic progression patterns i.e. simple linear TP pattern, TP with a constant theme, TP with devided themes and TP with a exposition of a split rheme.Chinese scholars adopted the view upheld by Halliday, such as Xu Shenghuan. He has produced articles on themes and rhemes and also paid great attention to the development of research of them, and proposed that themes and rhemes are both based on the speakers, while known and new message are both based on the hearer. Besides, Chinese linguists Xu Shenghuan, Huang Yan, Hu Zhuanglin and Huang Guowen etc put forward different thematic progression patterns. Huang Guowen put forward the notion of Conflated Theme for the first time in 2001.Writing is an important skill for an English learner to cultivate during the process of language learning. It requires the authors have a solid language foundation, and understand the discourse knowledge. At present, Chinese students are facing lots of problems when writing English compositions including thinking, content, language use, discourse model ability and so on. The thematic theory is an important part of textual metafunction. The analysis of theme-rheme structure can help us understand how the text should be organized and developed, and how the speaker conveys messages through the organization of discourse. From above all, we can know how close the relation between theme-rheme theory and writing. However, according to the recent materials, there are little work done on the research of English Writing and thematic theory. From 1995 to 2005, it contains 749 articles on the teaching of English writing, further more, articles on theme-rheme theory is added up to 14 with a low percentage of 1.9% in comparison to the whole number. Based on the theory of functional grammar theory, this thesis attempts to make a presentation on the research of the application of theme-rheme theory in culturing and developing the comprehensive talents, and the feasibility of this theory applied in this field. And also provides the readers a great deal of cases which have collected for a period.According to the thematic theory with Halliday as the representative, through the large amount of the compositions cases made up of CET4, and IELTS, this paper make a comparative analysis of these materials, do a lot of research on the present problems in English writing of Chinese students, analyze those reasons, and explore the effective solution to these questions.