Thematic Development of English Department Students’ Report Text: A Case Study Based on Students’ Achievement

Abstract

Thematic Development studies how ideas are developed in text in order to provide continuity and to organize how to write a coherent text. It can be applied as an approach for analyzing students’ texts. This study aims to find out the types of Thematic Development patterns used in report text written by the fourth-semester students of the English Department based on students’ achievement in Universits Sumatera Utara. A qualitative descriptive method was used to analyze the research data. The data were all the clauses in 15 students’ report text divided into three levels: High, Middle, and Low of students’ achievement. The data were analyzed by Systemic Functional Linguistics by Halliday and the theory of Thematic Development by Eggins. The findings showed there are three types of Thematic Development pattern used in students’ report text, they are Theme Reiteration pattern, The Zig-zag pattern, and The Multiple-Rheme pattern. It is found that the most dominant pattern used is Theme Reiteration pattern that occurs 50 times (67.5%), followed by The Zig-zag pattern which occurs 18 times (24.3%), and The Multiple-Rheme pattern which occurs 6 times (8.1%). This proves the use of the Theme Reiteration patterns is to enable the readers to focus on a specific element and to follow the development of the text. The high number of Theme Reiteration in students’ report texts may indicate the clauses in the text are cohesive and coherent.