An Empirical Research On The Effects Of Register Theory-Oriented English Reading Teaching On The Improvement Of Junior High School Students’ Cloze-Solving Ability

The English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition)emphasizes that discourse allows students to contact,understand,learn,and use language in an accurate and relatively complete context.Therefore,language learning must be carried out in discourse.A cloze test is a form of written discourse,and its score reflects the level of students’ language proficiency to a certain extent.But in practice,for lack of the necessary knowledge of discourse analysis,students usually get low scores in cloze tests.Based on the above situation,this study tries to design English reading teaching guided by Halliday’s register theory,focusing on the specific effects of the application of register theory on the cloze-solving ability of junior high school students.The purpose of this study is to improve the teaching status of junior high school English cloze tests,help students improve their problem-solving ability in cloze tests,and reduce the error rate of the problem-solving practice.Two questions are raised and answered in this study:(1)Can the register theory-oriented English reading teaching improve the cloze-solving ability of junior high school students? If so,in what aspects can it improve students’ cloze-solving ability(including understanding,thinking,and judgment ability)?(2)What are the differences in the effects of the register theory-oriented English reading teaching on the cloze-solving ability of junior high school students with different English levels?This research uses interview method and experimental method.90 students from two parallel classes of the eighth grade in a middle school in Guangzhou were taken as the research subjects and a 15-week teaching experiment was carried out.The two classes were divided into CC and EC.Among them,the data analysis was carried out by using SPSS 26.0 for statistics,and the data was collected from two tests and interviews.By comparing and analyzing the pre-test and post-test results of the controlled class and the experimental class,and the pre-test and post-test results of the experimental class itself,the conclusions are shown as follows:(1)Compared with the traditional reading teaching,the application of register theory to junior high school English reading teaching can more effectively improve students’ cloze-solving ability;(2)Reading teaching under the guidance of register theory has a positive impact on the thinking ability and understanding ability of junior high school students,and the improvement of their thinking ability is more obvious;(3)There are differences in the effects of the English reading teaching based on register theory on the problem-solving ability of junior high school students with different levels.Students in the high-level group improve their understanding ability significantly,and those in the low-level group improve their thinking ability the fastest,with a rapid growth of the number of students from the low-level group to the intermediate-level group.In conclusion,English reading teaching based on register theory can effectively improve junior high school students’ cloze-solving ability.In teaching practice,teachers are suggested to pay attention to the "scaffold construction",emphasize the overall discourse meaning,encourage students to think heuristically and focus on the logical connective words of the contexts,so as to stimulate students’ interest in reading,and improve their discourse analysis ability and cloze-solving ability.