| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 105 === The aim of the present study was to assess whether the instruction of TCs (Thematic Choices), TPs (Thematic Progressions) and rhetorical structures assisted English as Foreign Language (EFL) senior high school students in producing coherent and well-organized narrative texts. In the present study, TCs refer to the participants in unmarked themes and logical connectors in marked themes. The connections of themes and rhemes across sentences are TPs. Rhetorical structures refer to a particular rhetorical or linguistic pattern and stage conventionally found in similar texts. Rhetorical structures and TPs are indispensable indicators of coherence and important concepts in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory.
Students in Taiwan often have difficulty producing coherent texts given that most of the teachers lay emphasis on vocabulary and grammatical problems rather than discourse-level ones. The current research investigated the learners’ performance of TCs, TPs and rhetorical structures in picture writings. The participants were thirty 11th graders, composed of fifteen males and fifteen females, from a public senior high school in Northern Taiwan. The intervention consisted of ten classes of instruction. The students’ performances in TCs, TPs, and rhetorical structures were analyzed to understand whether they made progress in coherence after the instruction. A paired-T test was conducted to determine whether the total scores improved in the posttest. Pretest and posttest writings of the three learners, whose pretest scores were the lowest, in the middle and the highest, were further analyzed to verify the findings.
Several results were reported: (1) learners’ posttest scores significantly increased. (2) Generally, the learners produced coherent writings after the instruction informed by SFL. Most of the students diversified TCs in posttest writings. That is, the number of logical connectors in marked theme positions increased on posttest, which enhanced coherence. (4) The most frequently used TP type was constant TP in both pretest and posttest writings, but more TP types were employed to increase coherence in the posttest writings. (5) Most of the rhetorical moves were identified and well-established after the intervention, which helped create coherence.
In conclusion, the present research found that the instruction helped improve coherence in the 11th graders’ picture writings. Nonetheless, the generalizability of these results was subject to certain limitations. For instance, the intervention merely lasted 3 weeks and more time was recommended to allow sufficient practice. To implement this approach, however, extended professional development is needed to familiarize teachers with the instruction informed by SFL theory.
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