Analysis Of College English Writing On The View Of Textual Function Theory

College English writing has a significant meaning during the language learning as it is the reflection of language comprehensive skills. Students have to grasp how to organize the text on the base of all the language knowledge which they have learnt and absorbed, in order to put up the opinion clearly and provide logical explanation. However, there are some misunderstandings in the traditional English writing teaching process as teachers pay more attention to the structure of the sentence and regard it as the key point. This teaching model just emphasizes modeling of the composition, ignoring students’ own grasp and organization about the whole article which leads to single and simple form without clear outline. With this teaching approach, students slowly lose the overall textual organization sense and can not express their ideas effectively and clearly.Aiming at the weakness of current teaching methods, this paper tries to explore a more effective teaching approach with the application of textual function theory. It is derived from Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar which includes ideational meta-function, interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function. The textual function theory includes the theme theory and thematic progression model achieved by the cohesion devices. This paper collects data from sample compositions of different points provided by CET4 Examination Committee. According to the two aspects of the theory, we collect the number of theme types and thematic progression pattern and compare the data. According to the comparison, we can find the thematic structure and thematic progression pattern have big difference in the different points’ composition. In addition, there are direct relation between the final result of composition and the application of thematic structure and progression pattern. Thus, we can get the conclusion that the textual function theory can guide and influence the writing teaching to some extent.In the end, we come to the conclusion that under the guiding of textual function theory, teachers should pay more attention to the variation of the themes to make the organization colorful and attract the reader’s interest. Meanwhile, the proper adoption of different thematic progression models makes the structure clear and orderly which is helpful for the overall schema of the composition. Above all, the textual function derived from Systematic Functional Grammar has an effective guide for the English writing teaching. It can improve students’ organization skills to write a composition with rich content and clear schema.