TEACHING THEME AND THEMATIC PROGRESSION TO TOURISM STUDENTS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON THEIR WRITINGS

Abstract

Teaching writing to tourism students is challenging. Many students of diploma programs in hotel and tourism tend to focus to building practical skills such as cooking techniques or cutting methods, setting up table for lunch or dinner, or how to handle check-in or checkout, etc. They ‘hate’ writing exercises because they believe they will start career at operational level in the tourism industry where academic writing is not needed. As the result of this belief they lack of ability to expand idea or topic and what they can only produce short and undeveloped paragraphs. This paper discusses one alternative to approach to teaching writing i.e. using thematic progression. Using Halliday (2004) model students are introduced to the concept of information structure then to theme and rheme, and finally to thematic progression of texts. Then, the teacher guides students to identify how text is developed through its theme and rheme and to identify the types thematic progressions. Two writing tests were given i.e. pre and post teaching to see if there is any different in terms of text development, paragraph coherence, paragraph structure, thematic progression, and focus of text. A set of questions to measure students’ perception toward the lessons was also administered. The results show that students can manage to produce longer better-developed and cohesive paragraphs. Students’ positive perception toward theme-rheme and thematic progression concepts enable them to expand idea into longer text.