A Study Of Thematic Progression Patterns And Coherence In English Compositions In Senior Middle School

Cultivation of English writing ability is an important task of high school English writing teaching.At the same time,writing level is also an important reflection of high school students’ logical thinking and comprehensive language using ability.Many domestic and foreign scholars have studied writing ability of students from three aspects: vocabulary,syntax and discourse coherence.They found that the vocabulary and grammatical errors in student composition are easier to be corrected,but the difficult part lies generally in boring contents,lack of integrity and incoherence.Nowadays,domestic English writing teaching often pays more attention to the grammatical or syntactic structures and words used in students’ compositions but ignores the study of overall textual coherence.Based on such situation,this paper will study the relationship of the coherence of English writing of high school students and thematic progression theory they used in their writings.Based on Halliday’s thematic theory and Danes’ theme-rheme progression theory,this research uses text analysis and interview research methods to analyze the using of thematic theory in high school students’ compositions and explores the way to effectively improve high school students’ writing performance.And also the suggestions are given on the construction awareness in training students’ English writing efficiency.In this study,108 high school students’ writings from two classes in Jiang’an Middle School of Jiangsu Province were taken as the research subjects.The writing ability between the two classes was different.The author chose 108 students’ English compositions form their mid-term exam and compared and analyzed the thematic progression patterns in their writings,and then randomly selected a composition for each class and analyzed the thematic pattern in each essay.From the comparitive results we can infer the relationship between the use of the thematic theory and the quality of high school students’ English writing.After comparative analysis of a large amount of data,the author found that:firstly,many students like using simple themes and the same theme progression in the composition and cause incoherence and bad quality of the composition.Secondly,students with high scores of writing know how to increase the frequency of use of complex themes,sentence themes and continuations,and theme-derived advancing modes,and so it is concluded that composition quality is closed related to the use of theme choice.Teachers in middle schools should know some basic knowledge about thematic progression theory and apply it to the practical teaching of writing.