Mohammad Mehdi Motaharnia - MA Student of TEFL; Shiraz University
Zahra Montasseri - MA Student of TEFL; Shiraz University

Theme-rheme analysis deals with particular patterns utilized in any text to gain cohesion at the discourse level. Halliday (1985) defines theme as the point where the sentence starts and in another work, Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) define theme as the point of departure for the message . Rheme, on the other hand, is what comes next or the rest of the sentence. According to Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) concentration on thematic organization of texts is crucial to the understanding of learners as how to make their texts ‘hang together’. This study aimed to investigate the frequency of the five thematic patterns developed by Yarmohammadi (1994) across the intermediate course book of The Iran Language Institute (ILI). Three random (systematic) units of the book were chosen and analyzed. What can be concluded from numbers would be the fact that as units progress, so does the number of sentences implemented in the units which could be argued to be a factor indicating complexity accrued over the units progression. On the other hand, the results show that the diversity of patterns-over-unit progression was satisfied only to the halfway through the book and by the end of the book the results are in sharp contrast. The results of this study can be used by curriculum developers and syllabus designers to implement more diverse thematic patterns as units progress.

thematic organization, discourse, cohesion, coherence