The Theme-Rheme Theory Applied In Discourse Teaching To The Advanced Chinese Learner

The sequence of themes and rhemes result in the interaction between old informationand the new. The “thematic progression” of a discourse is formed by the themes andrhemes of each sentence. The six most familiar patterns are: The Constant Theme Pattern,Simple Linear Pattern, The Focus Rheme Pattern, The Alternative Pattern, TheComparative Pattern, The Derivative Pattern. And Chinese discourses use the simple linearpattern most.Advanced Chinese learners have already mastered large vocabularies and sentencestructures, but the output of their discourses have the following problems, such asThematic progression problems, information arrangement problems, cognitive problems,cohesion and coherence problems and the problems of low efficiency in communication.In this paper, I adopted the empirical research method, which is based on thematicprogression theory of teaching methods and the teaching methods of comparing thevocabulary, syntax and sentence transformation. By doing so, it is indeed improvedstudents’ writing coherence as well as the students overall writing abilities. In the end,through the experiment summary and classroom feedback, we proposed thematicprogression theory as my teaching designs.