Analysis of topic sentences of classification paragraphs and development of a diagnostic function

Abstract

In a paragraph, the topic sentence is an important component that clearly expresses the author's argument and indicates the direction of the entire paragraph. It is difficult for beginners to learn English to write appropriate topic sentences. In order to solve the problem, we have focused on classification paragraphs and developed a diagnostic function of the topic sentences. As the result of an evaluation of the function, we have found that the function correctly diagnosed 70.6% of appropriate topic sentences taken from text books for paragraph writing.