Study On Application Of Thematic Progression Theory To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

The cultivation of English writing competence is an essential part of English writing teaching in senior high schools. Writing quality best represents the standard of Senior High students’ logical thinking and comprehensive linguistic performance. However, the actual writing ability of them is far from satisfactory in that, according to the previous studies, some problems still exist in most senior high students’ English writing, such as inner emptiness, lack of integrity and coherence, more grammatical mistakes, with lack of integrity and coherence for particular.On the contrary, in English writing teaching, teachers have been attaching too much weight to grammar and syntactic structure so as to ignore the exploration of textual coherence. This can account for the poor writing ability of the students in a way. This thesis, based on Theme and Rheme Theory advanced by Halliday and Thematic Progression by the linguists such as Danes, makes an experimental study in order to figure out the effective ways to improve the overall quality of the texts written by the senior high school students.This study randomly selects as the research objects two natural classes of Grade 11 in Feng Cheng No.1 Middle School in LiaoningProvince, which are treated as the experimental class and control class respectively. In the experiment, Thematic Progression Theory is applied to English writing teaching in the experimental class for one semester.By contrast, the conventional methods are adopted in the control class,without any involvement of concepts concerning Thematic Progression Theory.In the process of the experiment, two writing tests are carried out respectively serving as the pretest and post-test. Besides, T-test and correlation analysis have been conducted on the students’ composition.Based on such analysis and question survey, this experiment through both quantitative & qualitative approaches has showed that: 1) it is feasible to apply Thematic Progression Theory to English writing teaching in senior high schools, which can help to improve the students’ writing ability and quality; 2) there is a significant difference in terms of the choice of theme and the pattern of thematic progression between the relatively high-score compositions and the relatively low-score ones, the former abundant in multiple theme and clause theme and cross use of different thematic progression patterns, the latter characteristic of simple theme and single use of thematic progression pattern; 3) by studying the patterns of Thematic Progression and grasping the knowledge of textual cohesion and coherence, the students have taken a more active attitude toward and strengthened textual awareness in English writing.This thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, explaining topic selection background, objectives and significance of the study, research methods and thesis organization.Chapter 2 mainly introduces the theoretic foundation of Thematic Progression Theory, and makes a literature review of the research work on its application to English writing teaching home and abroad. Chapter3 represents the experimental design of this study, including research objective and hypothesis, research object and tools, and the whole experimental process. Chapter 4 aims for the discussion and analysis of the collected data. The last chapter is the conclusion part, summing up the main findings and their significance, analyzing reality enlightenment of the study, and pointing out the research limitations and prospects for the future work.