Abstract: This article is dedicated to studying thematic progression as a text-forming and discourse-forming phenomenon. The notion of thematic progression is analyzed in terms of the functional sentence perspective theory, theory of actual division of the sentence, and discourse linguistics. Thematic progression contributes to the cohesive development of discourse, distribution of given and new information that needs to follow certain patterns. That is why the article also dwells on the thematic progression patterns and peculiar characteristics of their themeatic-rhematic organization. Basic thematic progression patterns are: simple linear thematic progression, thematic progression with a continuous (constant) theme, thematic progression with derived themes and thematic progression with a split rheme. They are considered to be universal, peculiar to many languages. That is why thematic progression patterns of English discourse units translated into Russian language often remain the same. Their high informativity, grammatical complexity, as well as differences in grammatical systems of English and Russian languages, necessity to adapt these units to the norms and rules of the Russian language can cause changes in thematic progression patterns of the translated units. The abovementioned facts can also lead to compression / decompression of information, changes of the word order in Russian translations.