TP patterns and Teaching of English Writing

To reveal the idiomatic way of organizing the article in English and find out the difference between English and Chinese, this paper made a contrastive study of Thematic Progression (TP) patterns between Chinese and English narratives, in light of the thematic theory of Halliday and TP patterns summarized by Liu Xiaoping (2004). After extracting eight articles in each language from Readers (in Chinese) and Reader's Digest (in English), a qualitative study of TP patterns in two languages was made in three aspects: the global proportions of TP patterns, the global proportions of inner-paragraph TP patterns and homogeneity of TP patterns. Based on the difference between Chinese and English narratives showed by the contrastive study, the author put forward three suggestions for teaching of English writing.