Theme and Rheme in Students' Writing

The objectives of this research were to investigate the types of theme and to describe the most dominant theme used in students’ writing. The data were 35 students’ Recount Text writing at SMA Negeri 4 Tanjung Balai, and the data were analyzed based on M. A. K Halliday & Matthiessen’s Theory (2014). The research was done using descriptive qualitative methods. The data collection involved observations and document study. The results showed that the most dominant theme was the topical theme (311, 74%) and the most dominant element of the topical theme in the students’ writing was the nominal group (222, 71%). The students used most of the clauses as a topical theme started by a word or phrase functioning as a subject and adjunct. All of the types of theme were used in the students’ Recount Text writing, except for the interpersonal theme (vocative adjunct, modal adjunct and finite verbal operators) and a part of the textual theme (continuative and conjunctive adjunct).


Introduction
states that a study of language includes four skills, they are listening, writing, speaking, and reading. Among the skills, writing is the most difficult skill to be learned because it needs hard thinking in producing ideas, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs at the same time. Many students face many difficulties when they begin to write; for instance, the students are difficult to think about what they will write, and the words that they should use, because they cannot get ideas quickly also they have so many errors or mistakes in their writing. It is because they practice writing text rarely and not carefully correct their writing. Also, they may not be able to put their ideas cohesively in a text and the people who read their writing, especially, teachers could not follow the development of the ideas from the text.
Writing becomes the most difficult subject for many students. It is a work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express the ideas, and organizing them into sentences, AICLL into paragraphs that will be clear for the readers. To be able to write effectively, the students should have sufficient knowledge of what to write and how to organize the language. Knowing what to write will enable the flow of ideas, whereas, knowing how to organize will help them to convey the ideas in a clear way to the readers. The students must know how to organize theme in writing. The theme represents "This is what we are talking about" while rheme is "This is what we are talking about it." To assess the students' ability and difficulty in writing, analyzing the way students organize theme and rheme and also the interaction of a theme and rheme on their writing is one of the best ways. The theme is the starting point of a clause; that is what the clause is about. The remainder of the clause is the rheme (Paltridge, 2006:145).
The combination of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, then those become writing can be brought together through the language that students use. From this research, we can know how the students organize their ideas in their writing; their theme and rheme go together or not to bring the meaning of the sentences.
In the case of Systematic Functional Linguistics, the language has three major functional components called language metafunctions. According to Halliday & Matthiessen (2014:83), "There are three metafunctions of language namely (1) Experiential function, (2) Interpersonal function, and (3) Textual function." Based on the three major functional components in language metafunctions, this research deals with the textual function of students' writing. Therefore, the research will be conducted for analyzing the theme and rheme in students' writing based on the facts, and theories above. Brown (2015:335) elaborates the upshot of the nature of writing that has produced writing pedagogies that focus the students on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently, how to use discourse markers and rhetorical conventions to put them cohesively into writing text, how to revise text for clearer meaning, how to edit text for appropriate grammar, and how to produce a final product. is a way to share personal meanings. The people construct their views on the topic.

Writing
They will give their views on a topic to each other then. Therefore, when constructing their views (ideas), people have to make it understandable and acceptable. Harmer (2004) then says that writing is used for a wide variety of purposes, it is proceeding in many forms.
Based on the explanation, writing is the process of conveying ideas about the writing to the readers which are determined by the quality of writing.
In writing, there are some characteristics of a good text or paragraph:

Coherence
A paragraph has coherence according to a principle of sentence orders. The sentences are put in order so that the readers can understand the ideas easily. The principles depend on the types of paragraphs we are writing. Coherence means to stick together; coherence is a matter of having the part of a piece of writing in the right and clear process.

Cohesion
Another characteristic of a good paragraph is cohesion. The topic sentences connect each other in all the supporting sentences.

Unity
The final characteristic of a well-written paragraph is unity. All the supporting sentences should relate to the topic sentence. Order in a text or paragraph is like an organization, but smaller in space so it may be simpler to consider the order as directed. Thus, order chronological steps are to express the ideas in the written form.

The Generic Structures of Recount Text
Pardiyono (2007:64-66) states that there are three elements which have been arranged on the theoretical structure:

1) Orientation
Recount starts by telling the readers who are involved, what happens, where the event takes place, and when it happens. Orientation gives the reader background information needed to understand the text, and the reader will recognize about scene-setting and context of the text.

2) Record of Events
The event is the main activity that occurs in the story of the text. In the writing recount text, events are ordered chronologically. Sometimes, additional detail is added to the text to give some information for the reader.

3) Re-Orientation
Re-Orientation is a closing statement that may include elaboration. Some recount texts also have a concluding paragraph. In this conclusion, the writer can give her comment or statement, but it is an optional one.

The Language Feature of Recount Text
Recount Text has some language features: 1) The use of the past tense to retell the events 2) Descriptive words about who, what, when, where, and how.
3) Proper nouns to identify those involved in the text. Textual metafunction tells about the verbal world, especially the flow of information in a text, and the metafunction concerned with the clause as the message.

Ideational Function
The ideational function of language is concerned with the communication and interlinking of ideas and may itself be broken down into the experiential and logical function. The ideational function is a way of a speaker expressing proportional content elements of his/her utterance, in other words, communicates their ideas. In operating this function the speaker refers to people, objects, and abstractions, actions, events, and states, features and qualities, and relationships of location, time, manner, reason, etc.

Interpersonal Function
Language is simultaneously used as representation, exchange, and organization of experience (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014:85). As social beings, humans cannot live isolated; they need to interact with others to fulfill their needs so the use of language to interact is said to perform the interpersonal function.
The interpersonal function means as a form of action; the speaker is doing something to the listener through language. To establish the relationship between the interesting interaction, we take on the different slogan function in the exchange. The Interpersonal function enables us to develop social relationships to interact with others. The Interpersonal function represents the speaker's meaning potential that takes into account the nature of the relation between the adresser (speaker) and the addressee (listener).
Interpersonal meanings are embodied in the person system, both as a pronoun (person as things, e.g she, you) and as possessive (person as dietic, e.g.her, your) in DOI 10.18502/kss.v5i4.8707 Page 506 AICLL the attitudinal type of epithet, in connotative meanings of lexical items functioning in the group, and in prosodic features such as swear words or a voice quality (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014:192). The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with the interaction between participants. The interpersonal relationship of interaction is realized through modality. Giving modal to a sentence is not making a categorical assertion, but is rather modifying their commitment to some degree by expressing a judgment or assessment of the truth of the situation.

Theme and Rheme
Halliday & Matthiessen (2014:89) state that theme is the element that serves as the point of departure of the message and locates and orients the clause within its context.  According to the example above, a first clause is a nominal group "The King". It is placed at the beginning of the clause, it is called as a Theme in the clause. The second clause has the adverbial group "very carefully" in its initial position. The last clause has a prepositional phrase indicating time, "on a Sunday night" in its initial position. While in marked theme, an element other than the subject places the theme position, so a condition is created for the appearance of the marked theme. For example:

Types of Theme
Theme Rheme In the morning, My father always drinks coffee.

Interpersonal Theme
According to Paltridge (2006:147), "Interpersonal Theme refers to an item that comes 1) The Vocative is any item, typically (but not necessary) a personal name, used to address.
Example of Vocative:
1) Continuative is one of a small set of words that signal a move in the discourse: a response, in dialogue, or a new move to the next point. If the same speaker is continuing.

Continuative Topical
Well, I will tell you now.

2) A Conjunction is a word or group that either link (paratactic) or binds (hypotactic)
the clause in which it occurs structurally to another clause. Example of conjunction:

Research Method
This study was conducted by using descriptive qualitative method purposed to find out the types of Theme and Rheme. Qualitative research was related to assisting in describing the common elements of the various forms of qualitative methods. Creswell

Result and Discussion
The findings show that the theory of Theme and Rheme as one of the realizations of Thematic structure in Functional Grammar was applied in the students' writing recount of senior high school. The finding also showed two types of Theme used in the texts.
The dominant type of Theme used in that students' writing was Topical Theme, 311 (74%).
The second one was Textual Theme, 111 (26%). There was no interpersonal theme in students' writing recount text. This means that the students used many declarative clauses and most of the clauses as a topical theme were started by word or phrase functioning as a subject and adjunct. Groups, it was because most of the clauses as Topical Theme were started by word or phrase had functioned as a subject; the students presented some adverbs and prepositions in the first positions, and they also used some conjunctions to link one clause to another clause.

AICLL
In the process of analysis, the researcher also finds the Marked and Unmarked Theme. There were 29 % Marked theme, while Unmarked was 71 %. This meant there were more unmarked Theme used in whole students' writings recount text because the students' writings were presented by word or phrase as a subject.
Textual Theme as the objective of the study in this analysis had 26 % from around the whole students' writing. The textual function of language is an interpretation of language in its function as a message that is realized by theme.
There are some representative examples of data:

1) Nominal Group
We looked at the making process of the terrace.

Conclusion
After analyzing the types of Theme in students' writing, the researcher finds some conclusions as follows: There are two types of Theme realized in Students' writing.

AM
On my vacation in Berastagi, I really loved the beautiful scenery. I was very happy because the air was so fresh. I went with my friends. My friends did not want to go home. There, we enjoyed the environment, I wanted to stay here for a long time. The environment was so clean from rubbish, I hope I would come here again.

JYM
One year ago, I went to Ponot together with my family. On the way, I looked scenery so beautiful and I enjoyed it, the water fell, it was so beautiful. We swam there, there were so many people. We rested because we were tired and we went home.