<![CDATA[This study examines pre-service teachers’ ability to organize ideas in English short stories through thematic progression. Pre-service teachers as learners and future teachers need to understand how written texts work because they will later explain, model, and assess writing in classroom contexts. This study used Systemic Functional Linguistics as the analytical framework and English short stories as a narrative genre because short stories contain multiple clauses organized into meaningful sequences, making them suitable for examining thematic progression patterns. The genre also requires writers to organize events and ideas coherently across a temporal structure, which reflects their ability to manage discourse organization. A qualitative descriptive design was employed, with data collected from 23 English short stories written by fourth-semester pre-service teachers in the English Education Department. The data were analyzed by identifying clauses, determining the Theme and Rheme of each clause, and classifying the thematic progression patterns into constant theme, linear theme, and split theme. Rather than focusing only on textual coherence, this study also explores how thematic progression patterns reveal pre-service teachers’ organization of ideas in writing that reflects their writing ability. The findings reveal that three patterns appeared in pre-service teachers' writing, which are constant, linear, and split theme patterns. The constant theme pattern was the most dominant of the total data, and was followed by the linear theme pattern, while the split theme pattern appeared the lowest. These findings indicate that pre-service teachers’ ability to organize ideas is still developing. On the other hand, this finding contributed by extending thematic progression analysis to narrative genre and by positioning pre-service teachers as a critical population for writing pedagogy, also offers a linguistic and pedagogical basis for designing writing instruction that supports idea organization, coherence development, and narrative competence in English teacher education programs.]]>
