چکیده:
It is generally recognized that many second language learners have difficulties with cohesion in academic texts. Writing seems to be the most difficult subjectfor many students. To produce good writing, it is necessary to know how to organize Theme and Rheme in a text. Thematic structure as an important feature in textual metafunction plays a significant role in promoting the textualcoherence. This research is concerned with the insights presenting the relationship between theme and rheme derived from Systemic FunctionalLinguistics. Halliday (1994) claimed that the structuring of language as a message is realized in the thematic structures of the constituent clauses of a text. To Halliday, the basic unit for thematic analysis is the clause. Thereby,this study was an attempt to compare different thematic types and thematic progression patterns in EFL students' academic writing texts. For this purpose,the researcher selected 30 MA students of English language teaching as the participants of the study after administering a TOEFL test and excluding the outliers. Each participant was required to write three different types ofargumentative, process and cause & affect compositions. The collected data were analyzed according to the Thematization process from the textualmetafunction aspects. The results showed some differences in the thematic structure of the different types of compositions. The findings of this study have some implications to the EFL students. They can learn to perform the sameanalysis in their own writings; thus improving cohesion in their own texts. Theme/rheme plays a major role in organizing the message and in enabling itto be communicated and understood clearly.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Thematic Organization in MA TEFL Students' Argumentative, Cause and Effect, and Process Types of Writing SaeidehAhangari Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran ahangari@iaut.
Keywords : Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Thematic structure, Theme, Rheme, Argumentative, process, and cause and effect writing Introduction Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), developed by Michael Halliday and his colleagues, has had a great impact on language teaching.
Although Sometimes restaurant foods may be delicious Textual interpersonal Theme Topical Rheme Writing In the second half of the twentieth century, writing, or written discourse, and teaching of writing began to receive a significant attention as a legitimate area of inquiry involving many related fields, such as applied linguistics and composition studies.
2. Is there any significant difference among the three types of themes (topical, interpersonal and textual) in terms of the frequency of use in the cause and effect type of writing?
Method This research was inspired by the insights from the theme and rheme concept derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with the aim of investigating thematic organization in the academic writing of TEFL MA students.
As for the textual theme, the statistical tables showed similar results for the argumentative and cause-effect types, while the use of the theme was highest in the process type of writing.
Regarding the topical theme, which was the most frequent one in each type of the writings, the findings of this study are in line with those of McCabe and Hillman (2007), who examined topical, textual and interpersonal differences between a news report and an editorial."