Thematic Progression And The Teaching Of College English Writing

No doubt, writing skill is of the utmost importance of the four English skills. It is writing that is the most effective way to test one's English proficiency. In recent years, a lot of profound research in writing teaching and learning has been made with great achievements in both the theoretical research and practice. But as far as writing is concerned, the students'writings are not satisfactory. The relationships between sentences are not clear and the connections are loose and unnatural. The passages are loose in structure, disordered in logic and the whole texts lack unity. In fact, the students also admit that how to achieve coherence is the most difficult point in writing. Both teachers and students consider writing the most difficult skill to enhance. Kaplan has pointed out that the pattern of English written discourse usually is Aristotelian linear and that of Chinese is circular or spiral. This difference leads to the negative transfer of students'mother tongue, with the result that many expressions and the layouts of students'English writing don't conform to the usual writing practice of English.Systemic Functional Grammar founded by Halliday is regarded as a powerful framework for EFL instruction. He classified the metafunctions into three categories: experiential function, interpersonal function and textual function. The textual function refers to the integrity, identity and coherence of a text. Thematic structure, an important factor to achieve textual metafunction, plays a significant role in examining whether and how a sequence of sentences or paragraphs constitutes a coherent text. It is on the basis of thematic theory and thematic progression patterns that the thesis conducts the experimental teaching and research on the CET 4 writing.This research aims to achieve three purposes: firstly, to discover the application of TP patterns in English written discourses of non-English majors; secondly, to investigate the present situation of CET 4 writing teaching for non-English majors; thirdly, to testify the validity of thematic theory and TP patterns in improving the coherence of passages.In order to achieve these three purposes, an empirical research is conducted. 32 sophomores majoring in Politics and Law in Qingdao University of Science and Technology are chosen as the subjects. 32 compositions of their own writing practice in class are collected as the pretest samples for the analysis of the thematic structure and TP patterns. A questionnaire, a writing teaching experiment and the text revising tasks are involved and"Thematic Operational Approach"is adopted. The main purpose is to testify the validity of this new writing teaching method in improving the textual coherence.The results indicate that although the students have transferred their focus attention from grammar accuracy to the contents and the structure of the passages, how to organize the materials in a coherent way is still the major obstacle of their writing. Loose structures and incoherence are common in most of the compositions. The rare-use of TP patterns is the cause to the problem.Thematic theory and TP patterns, as a trial, are applied into writing teaching in this research. Thematic Operational Approach based on the thematic theory and TP patterns has been proved to be effective. It may not only strengthen students'awareness of applying some TP patterns, but also promote the coherence of the whole passage. It is worth trying in college English writing teaching for non-English majors.