Thematic Choice In Application Letters: A Contrastive Study Between Chinese Undergraduates And American Undergraduates

Theme, as an important notion in Systemic Functional Grammar, was definedby Halliday (1994) in An Introduction to Functional Grammar as the point ofdeparture of message and realized by the first position in the English clause. Theme isconsidered to play a crucial role in the construction of texts, particularly in theorganization of the message. The current study aimed to do a contrastive study on thesimilarities and the differences between native speakers and non-native speakers intheir thematic choice of writing English application letters and intended to analyze thereasons causing the results.As for data collection, for the first group (native speakers of English), letterswritten by American undergraduates were collected. For the second group (non-nativespeakers of English), application letters written by Chinese undergraduates wereanalyzed. For group one, data were collected from application letters written byundergraduates from Colgate University in U.S.A. and from the website. For grouptwo, most of the data came from job application letters written by senior Englishmajors in Chang’an University. Other data were collected from the English writingbooks and from the cover letters (application letters) written by some domesticpostgraduates. For each group, thirty one samples were selected from the collecteddata. By applying Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theory, the current study analyzed thecollected application letters. A quantitative analysis was conducted on the percentageof types of Themes, and a qualitative analysis was performed on the semanticcategories in the head of circumstantially marked Themes. T-tests of significance wereperformed through the software of SPSS on the distribution of different types ofThemes in the two groups.According to the results, both two groups of writers preferred simple Themes tomultiple Themes and preferred unmarked Themes to marked Themes. As for the distribution of different types of Theme, simple Theme took the highest percentageand native writers chose more simple Themes than non-native writers. But there wasno significant difference between the two groups in the distribution of textual Themesand interpersonal Themes. Among all the sub-types of textual Themes, the two mostfrequent cases were co-ordinators and additives. In terms of markedness, nativewriters chose more marked Themes than non-native writers. Of all the sub-types ofcircumstantially marked Themes, the three most frequent ones are time, manner andplace.In conclusion, in the writing of English application letters, simple Themes andunmarked Themes should be applicants’ first priority. But the importance of textualThemes cannot be neglected for the fact that textual Themes function as the cohesivedevices in the organization of the discourse. Interpersonal Themes are relatively notso important but they are also needed in some particular parts or sentences of theapplication letters. Especially when asking for an interview or stating one’s personalidea, words or phrases like “please” and “in my opinion” are quite indispensible.Although unmarked Themes took a higher percentage than marked Themes in thecollected letters, the truth is that sometimes marked Themes are also necessary. Whenthe cohesion and coherence of the discourse have to be fulfilled, other grammaticalunits, other than subject, have to appear at the first position of a clause to function asthe Theme. One of the findings was that non-native writers were not good at choosingthe sub-type of manner as the Theme in starting a clause, which may influence theirwriting level of application letters.