A Study On The Application Of Thematic Progression Pattern To English Writing In Senior High School

English writing is not only a very important language skill, but also the important measurement of the students’ language level. With the rapid acceleration of English learning in China, it gives more and more demands on learners’ English writing ability. However, English writing has always been the weakest part of senior school students, in addition to the problems of lacking vocabulary and grammar errors, there is a common phenomenon that many students write the sentences one after another without thinking, which will result in the connection between sentences is unnatural. Thus, sentence patterns lack flexibility and variety and text structure is loose. Therefore, how to improve teaching of English writing has become an urgent task.The thematic theory is one of the most essential aspects of the discourse analysis theory among Halliday’s study of systematic functional grammar. The analysis of thematic progression patterns can help us understand how the text should be organized and developed, and how the speaker conveys messages through the organization of discourse. From above all, we can know how close the relation between thematic progression pattern and writing. However, according to the recent materials, there is little work done on the research of English writing and thematic progression pattern. This article explores the application of thematic progression pattern in English writing teaching from the practice of teaching, aiming to present a more effective and more practical English writing teaching method, and it mainly deals with the following three questions:1. Can the application of thematic progression pattern improve students’ learning strategies in English writing?2. Can the application of thematic progression pattern enhance students’ English writing coherence?3. Can the application of thematic progression pattern improve students’ English writing proficiency?The research applied interview,tests and questionnaire as research instruments, two classes, altogether 90 students(the number of students in each class is 45, in Grade Two from No. 3 Senior School of Baoding are involved in the study, one class as the Experimental Class, teaching in the thematic progression pattern teaching methods in English writing class; another class as the Control Class, using the traditional teaching method, pretest and posttest were conducted in the two classes. Test paper for them is the National College Entrance Examination. After the test, SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze whether there was significant difference between the subjects of two classes.The author drew the following conclusions: 1.The application of thematic progression pattern in writing class can improve students’ language learning strategies. 2. The application of thematic progression pattern can help to enhance coherence of students’ English writing. 3. The application of thematic progression pattern can effectively improve students’ English writing competence. Research shows there is no doubt that the thematic progression pattern can improve English writing teaching.During this study, there are also a number of shortcomings that need further study. It is no doubt that the author thinks the application of thematic progression pattern is feasible and effective in English writing teaching of senior high school.