Theme across Genres: Implication for L2 Learners’ Discourse Competence
Titilade Adefunke Oyebade
General Studies Unit
Federal University of Technology, Akure
08136381060
ABSTRACT
Halliday (1985: 67) believes “…by analyzing the thematic structure of a text clause by clause, we can gain an insight into its texture and understand how the writer makes clear to us the nature of his underlying concerns.” This means that comprehension and information retrieval in texts which are basic elements of discourse comprehension and competence can be partially traced to text producers’ deployment of theme and thematic patterns in texts. This paper therefore is a contrastive examination of theme and thematic patterns and complexities across science and non-science texts to see how these thematic patterns and complexities behave across these different genres. The aim of the study is to see the implication of these differences in the teaching of discourse comprehension and competence in L2 context. Fifty science and non-science texts comprising of comprehension passages from EAP reading texts are sampled for their thematic patterns and complexities. The theoretical framework is based on the view of theme in Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Danes (1970, 1974) concept of thematic organisation.