| Language learning is a systematic process involving phonology, semantic, syntax, and discourse analysis. Traditional language teaching and learning overemphasizes grammar points, which contributes to the radical difference between the score of students and their actual ability to utilize English. It is approved from various kinds of English test, for example, CET4, CET6, IELTS, in which the writing score is commonly rather low. Traditional writing teaching places particular emphasis on the accumulation of vocabulary and sentence structures, and students are instructed merely to modify how to make a sentence, thus leading to the lack of cohesion and logic in their writing. This paper is intended to illustrate a means of improving discourse cohesion in IELTS writing, and explore an effective approach to English writing teaching.The thematic theory is one of the most essential aspects of the discourse analysis theory among Halliday's study of systematic functional grammar. The notion of theme and rheme was first put forward by Mathesius, founder of Prague School, as early as in 1939. It is stated that theme is the starting point of utterance and embodies the known or given information, whereas rheme is what the speaker intends to express with regard to the starting point of the utterance and contains new information. In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday, for the first time, proposed and classified themes into three categories, and Danes, in 1978, articulated a comprehensive and successive correlation of sentences in a discourse as "thematic progression pattern". He deems that the organization of information in a discourse is carried forward by certain rules, thus forming thematic progression pattern, which can be classified into four types. In recent years, the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern have attained an increasingly amount of concern by scholars at home and abroad. Studies show that the discourse cohesion is largely determined by a sequence of thematic progression pattern, which varies differently in regard to the types of discourse.The present paper aims at verifying the two hypotheses:1) English writing teaching based on the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern could vary the types of theme in students'sentences, enhance the coherence of their composition and improve their English writing competence.2) The approach on the basis of the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern could alter students'attitudes towards English writing.The thesis first analyzes the problems existing in our English writing teaching, and then introduces the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern by reviewing related literature and discusses their characteristics. To verify the hypotheses, we carried out an experiment which lasted 30 days with 45 class periods.60 candidates, who were going to take part in IELTS, participated in the experiment. They were non-English majors in their second or third year at college. A pre-experiment English writing test was held to prove that the students of both the experimental group (30) and the control group (30) were of the same writing proficiency. English writing teaching based on the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern was offered for the experimental group, and a post-experiment English writing test was held to testify the effectiveness of the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern. The pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires distributed to the students of the experimental group to find out their attitudes to English writing based on the thematic theory and the thematic progression pattern. From the detailed analysis of the collected data, we find that English writing teaching based on the thematic theory and thematic progression pattern can not only help students achieve the variation of the sentence and the coherence of the passage but also improve their ability to analyze a passage, thus enhancing their comprehensive capability of using English.
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