| English writing is an essential skill of under-graduate students’ English learning, while it has been considered the weakest part of college English teaching. The lack of discourse coherence and cohesion has been one of the most outstanding problems in under-graduate students’ English writing. However, the current English writing teaching overemphasizes vocabulary, phrases and grammar points, which results in ignoring the analysis of structures and cohesive devices of a passage.The thematic theory and thematic progression patterns are important components of analyzing discourse structures, which play key roles in improving coherence and fluency of students’ writing. This thesis intends to analyze the use of theme and TP patterns in argumentative compositions written by the English majors in Minnan Normal University. A series of writing trainings and the study of thematic theory and TP patterns have been conducted to the students on the purpose of strengthening students’ awareness of theme and mastering some common TP patterns. The paper tries to explore the influence of thematic progression on paragraph unity and textual coherence in argumentative writing in order to improve the students’ argumentative writing quality through the use of thematic theory and TP patterns.This research combines the methods of theoretical analysis and experiment, which takes the one-group pre-test post-test design based on the TP theory as its theoretical basis, attempts to compare and analyze the writing scores and the use of theme and TP patterns in English argumentative compositions written by the English major students before and after the experiment. The results prove that after four months’ experiment, the average writing score is increased. The proportion of multiple theme and clausal theme and interpersonal theme used in argumentative composition is increased while simple theme and textual theme is decreased.The types of TP patterns in post-test are more diversified than in pre-test. These results indicate that students’ awareness of discourse coherence has been enhanced and their writing ability has been improved after the training of thematic and TP theory. |
