As a teacher of English, in an attempt to help my students at FOE, HNUE who were struggling with producing a coherent writing text, I decided to carry out this study with the hope of describing the patterns of TP emerging in their writing and finding out their typical TP problems so that the pedagogical remedy could be suggested. | HNUE JOURNAL OF SCIENCE Educational Sciences 2020 Volume 64 Issue 4B pp. 51-60 This paper is available online at http AN ANALYSIS OF THEMATIC PROGRESSION OF SOPHOMORE STUDENTS WRITING AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen Faculty of English Hanoi National University of Education Abstract. An analysis of the thematic progression TP patterns of 35 paragraphs by the sophomore students at Faculty of English FOE Hanoi National University of Education HNUE was conducted based on Paltridge s 2006 analytical model. Its results show that the constant theme pattern is the most frequently used and the TP problems of brand-new theme overuse of constant progression interruption between rheme and subsequent themes and empty rheme are committed by students. To solve these problems a package of instructional steps is presented with twofold objectives developing students awareness of theme rheme and TP patterns and helping them apply the concepts to improve coherence in their writing. Keywords coherence theme and rheme thematic progression. 1. Introduction Teaching instruction tends to focus on local coherence problems related to mechanical and grammatical errors or cohesive devices despite the fact that global coherence which looks at the coherence of a text as a whole needs to be addressed in a systematic way by teachers of writing 1 2 . This means that the teachers need to look beyond the traditional grammar of the clause when teaching and explaining to students where they are losing effectiveness in their arguments at the level of discourse 3 . To meet these expectations frameworks at text level should be employed. One of those frameworks could be found in the theory of functional grammar on theme rheme and thematic progression TP . The concept of theme rheme was introduced as early as the mid-1800s and later developed by the Prague school of linguists 4 . While a number of researchers such as Firbas 5 Fries 6 and
