The Application Of Thematic Progression In American And Chinese College Students’Argumentative Writings

Writing, as a basic skill like listening, speaking and reading, reflects thestudents’overall ability of English learning. It is also a very effective way for studentsto express their emotion. To college students in China, English writing plays a veryimportant role in their tests. It is a criterion to measure whether they have done well inEnglish learning. However, there exist a lot of writing problems in those students’articles, such as, monotonous sentence pattern, simple words, lacking coherencebetween sentence and sentence and so on. In order to solve these problems, this articlefocuses on the similarities and diversities of thematic progression patterns used inAmerican and Chinese students’writings.The term Theme and Rheme is first proposed by Vitem Mathesius, anoutstanding representative scholar of Prague School, in 1939. Then Danes (1974) putsforward the concept of thematic progression. It is also Danes, in 1978, articulated acomprehensive and successive correlation of sentences in a discourse as thematicprogression pattern. He claims that the organization of information in a discourse iscarried out through certain rules. In recent years, the theory of thematic progressionpatterns has been widely used by linguists both from home and abroad, and it is also apopular theory for researchers to solve the problem of coherent. While in this paper,the author tries to use it to solve the problems exist in Chinese college students’argumentative writings.Based on the thematic progression patterns, the author analyzed ninety argumentative writings, thirty written by native American students and sixty byChinese students, which are randomly selected from the corpus LOCNESS andWECCL. By using the methodology of contrast and corpus-based analysis, the authorfinds out that there are some similarities and differences in American and Chinesecollege students’argumentations. After the author’s careful analyzing, it comes to theconclusion that the TP Patterns applied into both of them are the same. However, theirapplying percentages are different. That is to say that the frequently used patterns aredifferent. At last, the author analyzes what teachers and students can do to make fulluse of these findings to improve Chinese college students’writing ability and givessome advice.