Themes and theme progression in Swedish advanced learners’ writing in English

This study investigates how the Themes and Theme progressions in a sample of Swedish advanced learners‟ writing contribute to the method of development in their texts. A comparison is made to a sample of similar writing by British university students. It was found that the advanced learners‟ sample contains more interactional Themes, which create a dialogic method of development similar to that found in conversational language. Themes and Theme progressions which are typical of expository writing, on the other hand, are used less frequently. These include discourse label Themes, summative progressions, which manage the build-up of information as it accumulates in the text, and split progressions, which signal hierarchical relations between parts of the informational content.