ii Abstract Writing is one of the difficulties for English learners, which has been paid more and more attention in English teaching. Writers often meet with difficult pr oblems in writing such as where to start with, how to connect sentences or paragraphs and so on. Thematic Progression Theory is an important part of three components of Hallday’s theory of metafunctions in the Systemic-Functional Gr ammar by Halliday (1970), indicating the relationship between themes and rhemes of different clauses in the hierarchy of text. By understanding TP Patterns in a text, writers can know how to work out the skeleton of the plot, how anize and develop a text more efficiently and effectively. Icy Lee (2002) has eeded in applying the Thematic Theory in the teaching of English wr iting, while few related experimental researches were made in China. This thesis is based on Halliday’s Thematic Theory (1970), the six patters of Thematic Progression by Huang Guowen (2001), aiming at verifying the effects and feasibility of applying TP Theory into Chinese non-English majors’ English writing course and the corr esponding relationships between TPPs and genres by exploring the differences in the use of TPPs between Chinese non-English majors’ English narrations, argumentations and English NSs’. Thirty subjects were sophomores from Tourism College, Inner Mongolia Finance and Economy University. Data collected in this study were from two writing tasks in the pretest and the post-test, and English NSs’ writings from a corpus - VLC Web Concordancer. Through the study in the pretest, treatment, and the post-test, the following research questions were ex pected to be solved : 1) Are there any differences in the use of TPPs between Chinese non-English majors’ English narrations, argumentations and English NSs’ in the pretest and the post-test? If any, wh at are they? 2) Does the t eaching of TP Theory increase the use of the TPPs in Chinese non-English majors’ writ
