The Functions Of Cohesion And Coherence In Cloze Test Of CET-4

Cohesion and coherence are the most fundamental criteria, the core of the analysis. A textual composition mostly relies on the mutual function of cohesion and coherence. Usually cohesion is the grammatical and lexical relationship between different elements of a text. It deals with the external aspect of a text and is characteristic of explicitness. Coherence refers to the cognitive continuity of sense of a text. It is based on the shared knowledge or social and situational context of readers or listeners. Coherence deals with the internal aspects of a text and is characteristic of implicitness.In this research paper, cohesion and coherence are taken as two perspectives to analyze the cloze test part in CET-4 and some methods are found out to help the students to make a better performance in exams. To put it in another way, this paper aims to apply the theories of cohesion and coherence to cloze test so as to bring about new inspiration to the teaching of college English.The paper first analyzes authentic papers from the year 1996 to 2006 in an attempt to find out how the functions of cohesion and coherence are embodied in cloze test, and the classification standards are mainly based on Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy on cohesion and coherence. During the research process, all the blanks are broken down into the two large categories of cohesion and coherence and further division is made in each category and specific instances are provided to illustrate each type. Eventually, all the 13 samples are analyzed and the final result is clearly displayed. 50.4% of the blanks are found to be related to cohesion and 20.8% to coherence in the 13 sample papers.Besides, the author designs a research including pre-test and post-test to examine the cohesive awareness of college students. However, the result of pre-test is that college students'cohesive awareness is not strong. By contrast, the result of post-test shows that they can take advantage of cohesive devices to help construct and understand a coherent text. In addition, by interviewing some college English teachers, the author finds that most of them do not have a clear understanding of cohesion, not to mention cultivate students'awareness of textual cohesion in teaching. This is one of the major reasons leading to students'weak awareness of textual cohesion.On the basis of the thorough analysis of the data and the findings derived from the tests and interview, the author puts forward some practical suggestions to apply cohesion theory to ESL reading teaching so as to help improve ESL readers'cohesive awareness and reading ability. Meanwhile, the author also points out that it will be quite helpful to the students both in their performance in doing cloze test part in CET-4 and in their English comprehension ability if they can make good use of cohesion and coherence knowledge.