| Discourse is a semantic unit that expresses the potential meaning.Discourse knowledge was explicitly added to the English Curriculum Standards in 2017 which attached great importance to the integrity of language and stressed scientific and humane knowledge conveyed by the discourse.Discourse can provide students with language and knowledge materials to develop their learning strategies.In the process of learning and using language,students will be exposed to texts in different styles.Understanding the main writing purpose,textual features and composition,and cohesion and coherence in texts of different styles are important indicators for students to form language ability.Discourse analysis,on one hand,enables students to avoid learning vocabulary and grammar knowledge in isolation from the context.On the other hand,students can acquire different languages conveyed by connotative and meaningful language knowledge to value structural characteristics of the text in the process of constructing text meaning and thematic exploration activities.Therefore,it is a critical quality for language learners to master and possess the discourse analysis ability in English learning.Cloze belongs to a comprehensive test with the application to language knowledge,which takes up large proportion in the National Matriculation English Test.The quiz setter aims to design an incomplete article with a complete structure,which conforms to the senior high student’ capability for the purpose of testing students’ reading ability.And then designer deliberately deletes some words,and asks the testees to fill in the best answer among the four options to restore the structure of the article.In recent years,the English Syllabus of the College Entrance Examination has clearly pointed out that it is necessary to reduce the pure and simple grammar questions and highlight the application-oriented questions in a specific context.In summary,cloze test not only examines students’ language knowledge,but also inspects their logical reasoning and analysis ability is based on the basic context and text meaning.The author finds that most of the researches tend to apply the discourse analysis theory to reading teaching,and the researches on the cloze test are not enough.In addition,most researches on cloze tests combine discourse cohesion and coherence theory,while researches on cloze tests applied to complete discourse analysis theory seem to be few at present.Therefore,this research utilizes the integrated theoretical knowledge and teaching practice,combined with domestic and foreign literature reviews,and applies the discourse analysis theory to cloze test from the four dimensions of discourse cohesion,coherence,context and genre to the actual teaching activities.The research questions are presented as follows:(1)What textual problems influence students when they complete the cloze test?(2)How to improve students’ cloze techniques through discourse analysis theory?(3)What effect does discourse teaching have on students’ English learning?The research objects of this study are two parallel classes of students from Senior Two in No.62 High School in Taiyuan,respectively Class Two and Class Three.Class Two has 47 students and Class Three has 48 students.And the research lasts for about fourteen weeks.Class two is the experimental class in this research and Class Three is the control class.The instruments of this thesis include pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire,pre-test and post-test and a interview.At the beginning of the experiment,the author will carry out a pre-questionnaire survey and cloze test conducted in two classes to analyze and judge their discourse analysis ability and learning strategies while they coping with the cloze test.Based on the analysis of the pre-test questionnaire,the results show that students’ awareness of discourse analysis is poor and insufficient.The learning strategies to deal with cloze questions are not systematic enough.Meanwhile,teachers spend less time on penetrating discourse analysis theory into teaching.Secondly,in the implementation stage,Class Two is taught with the discourse analysis theory from the perspective of cohesion,coherence,context and genre and they are studying the Book 5 at the same time.Class Three still adopts the traditional cloze teaching method which gives more focus on discourse translation and the grammar.At the end of the experiment,the author draws a conclusion from the post-test and post-questionnaire: compared with the CC,the students in the EC make a great difference on cloze questions and their learning strategies have greatly improved,which have enhanced the students’ discourse awareness to lay a solid foundation for reading comprehension.The interview is conducted at the end of the experiment which finds out the changes of teachers’ discourse teaching strategies and whether the students’ discourse analysis ability have enhanced or not.This research collects and analyzes the relevant data of questionnaires,interviews,and cloze test.The data of this paper shows that the application of discourse analysis theory to cloze test is favorable for senior high students who hold a positive attitude and form a highly effective habits of solving cloze questions.Student’s discourse awareness have been greatly improved and enhanced.Discourse analysis enables students to understand the article better from a macro perspective based on the discourse context and genre.From the micro aspect,students will carry out detailed analysis from the discourse cohesion and coherence to improve problem-solving ability and competence.Therefore,teachers can gradually guide students to improve the sensitivity of discourse text to strengthen student’s language knowledge and language skills,which can cultivate students’ capability to analyze problems comprehensively. |
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