The Influence Of Thematic Choices On The Thesis Writing Quality Of English-Major Undergraduates

Based on the classification of themes by Halliday, the present study was designed to probe into the influence that the thematic choice imposed upon writing qualities of the theses writings by English-major undergraduates. The thematic choice concerned the choice for the "point of departure of message" of clauses within the categories of theme Halliday had identified. The research was carried out in the way of quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative research was conducted by analyzing 69 theses writings by undergraduate English majors at Chang'an University, which are categorized into three groups according to their final scores. By analyzing the categories of theme in each thesis writing, the author finally draw out the mean percentage of each category of themes in each thesis. With the primary data being synthesized, the comparison is conducted horizontally by contrasting the distributional modes of types of themes in each level of thesis and vertically by comparing each theme category in different levels of thesis. And the qualitative research was carried out in the form of an interview with the involvement of thirteen interviewees to answer six questions. The interviewees were divided into two groups (G1 and G2) of the intermediate level and the advance level according to the mean scores of their writing courses in the first three college years.It was found in the present study that five types of themes (the nominal group, the propositional group, the textual-topical in independent clauses and the finite themes including thestructural-topical and the topical (Wh-element) in dependent clauses) enjoy the majority of htree levels in horizontal comparison. Whereas other types of themes enjoy the minority of the total with some slight differences. And in the vertical comparison study, the categories of themes in A-level writings, except for the nominal group of simple theme of one structural element, possess higher mean percentage and more varieties than those in B- and C- level writings. But the application of the textual-interpersonal-topical theme, the clausal-interpersonal theme and the predicated theme are far from enough, which call for more attention while conducting thesis. And the result of the interview showed that most of the students got confused about the arrangement of the sentence structures when they revised their thesis, and most of them reckoned that if the varieties of beginnings of clauses were taken into consideration, there should be an effective theoretical framework for them to scrutinize the sentence structures of their writings, which would make their writings presented in a logical and natural way.There are several implications the present study supposed to contribute on the basis of the research result. First and foremost, it is advisable for the English--major undergraduates to learn about the thematic theory for the sake of composing and polishing their English writings in a better way, including their graduation theses writings. Second, it is also beneficial for teachers to learn and introduce the theory to improve students'writing competence and to employ the thematic theory when they assess students'English compositions, including the graduation thesis as well.