A Research On Thematic Theory And Its Application To The Teaching Of College English Writing

Theme and rheme were first proposed in 1939 by Vitem Mathesius. Theme is the starting point of utterance and carries the known or given information; while rheme is what the speaker says about in regard to the starting point of the utterance and carries new information. F. Danes, in1974, proposed a more dynamic view of theme: Thematic Progression (TP). He propounds that the organization of information in a discourse is determined by the progression in the sequence of themes and their corresponding rhemes, and this progression between the successive themes and rhemes can be defined as thematic progression which represents text cohesion. In recent years, thematic theory has gained more and more attention in discourse analysis and abundant studies have been conducted on thematic theory both at home and abroad. Some scholars deal with the relationship between thematic theory and discourse coherence; and some conduct contrastive study of thematic structure in Chinese and English discourses; besides, recently there are some researches on its application in the translation field as well as the application to English teaching.This study is to apply thematic theory to the teaching of college students'writing, and two hypotheses are proposed that 1) The more varied the theme types and TP patterns are, the higher scores of English writing are; the frequency of multiple themes and simple linear pattern of high score compositions is higher than that of low score compositions. 2) The students'writing ability can be improved through the training of thematic theory. It aims at probing into the effect of the application. Based on the 40 compositions collected and the data collected in the experiment, a series of analyses and comparative study are conducted. By the comparative study on theme types, TP patterns and scores in pre-teaching and post-teaching compositions, the results show that theme types and TP patterns are closely related to the score of English writing, and the students'writing score can be improved through the training of thematic theory.Finally, some pedagogical implications which may be helpful in the future teaching of writing are put forward; the conclusion is drawn, that is, themes and TP patterns are helpful for students'coherent writing, and the students'writing ability can be improved through the training of thematic theory; then the limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of the thesis.