Theme and Thematic Progression in Students’ Recount Texts: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

This research paper entitled Theme and Thematic Progression in Students" Recount Texts attempted to investigate how the students organize their ideas in their recount texts, seen from the Theme and Thematic Progression and to figure out the implication of Theme and Thematic Progression used by students for the flow of texts. This research was conducted in a private senior high school in Bandung. The research employed a qualitative design, embracing characteristic of a case study. The data were nine students" Recount texts from three different levels of achievement including low, middle, and high achievers. The findings showed that seen from types of Theme, there were three types of Themes employed by students in their recount texts, namely the topical, textual, and interpersonal Themes in which the topical Theme was the most frequent Theme occurred in the text. In terms of Thematic Progression, there were two dominant patterns used by the students to organize their ideas in their recount Text, including the Theme reiteration and the zigzag patterns. Themes and Thematic Progression used by the students had the implication for the flow of texts. Furthermore, the use of the cohesion devices (e.g. ellipsis, reference, and conjunction) made the flow of the text much clearer. It was recommended for the teacher to apply Theme and Thematic Progression as the tools to improve students" writing skills and further research to analyze Theme and Thematic Progression on different genre or even spoken texts with different focus.