An Empirical Study On The Coherence Of English Writing In Terms Of Thematic Theory

To be one of the important constitute of language learning, English writing is paid close attentionby the linguists and teachers. Coherence is a fundamental writing skill and is emphasized by theteachers in the class all the time. However, most of the language teachers always like to study thecoherence through the grammar cohesion and vocabulary cohesion but neglect the internal relationshipof the discourse, namely, the relation among the sentences, the whole discourse and the situation, whichresults in a lot of incoherent compositions with beautiful vocabulary and right grammar. And suchphenomenon can be seen in many important tests, such as the CET-4, CET-6, IELTS and so on. Thispaper will discuss how to strengthen the coherence of the CET-4composition and hopes to find a moreefficient way to teaching and learning English writing.Thematic structure is one of the three sub-systems of the discourse function and attracts a lot ofscholars’ attention at home and abroad. They studied it and found that the internal coherence of thediscourse is largely determined by a sequence of thematic progression patterns. On the basis of therelated study, this paper aims at verifying these two hypotheses:(1) after teaching the students thethematic theory, their English writing level and the coherence of their composition are both improved;(2) after learning the thematic theory，the students’ interest in English writing has increased.An experiment was carried out to verify the hypotheses. It lasted for29days with18classes.56students from two classes (experimental class and control class) participated in the experiment. Theywere all non-English majors at their second school year and going to attend the CET-4. Apre-experiment writing test was arranged for these two classes to testify that their English writingproficiency were similar. Then, the teaching procedures were conducted. The experimental class wasinstructed based on the thematic theory while the control class in the traditional way. After the main partof the experiment, a post-experiment writing test was organized to compare with the pre-test forchecking whether the writing ability of the students had improved or not. And a pre-experimentquestionnaire and a post-experiment questionnaire were completed only by the experimental class tofind out their attitude to English writing and whether their interests in English writing were increased ornot after the experiment. Finally, after the last class,10students from two classes were chosen randomly to take part in an interview on their attitude on English writing. Based on the data collected during theexperiment, I discussed them and found that the English writing teaching approach based on thematictheory facilitates not only improving the students’ discourse analysis ability but also forming a clearerthinking line. Thus this kind of teaching approach has strengthened the coherence of their composition,improved their writing ability and enhanced their interest in English writing.