Research On Senior High School Cloze Test From The Perspective Of Textual Coherence And Cohesion Theory

Coherence and cohesion are the most fundamental criteria---the core---of the textual analysis. A textual composition mostly relies on the mutual function of coherence and cohesion. Usually coherence refers to the cognitive continuity of sense of a text. It is based on the shared knowledge of cultural and situational context of readers or listeners. Coherence deals with the internal aspects of a text and is characteristic of implicitness. And 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.After carrying out a thorough study on previous researches, the writer of this thesis finds that there has been no study on the teaching textual coherence knowledge in senior high school. Cloze test in senior high schools is generally supposed to be an effective means to test the test-takers'integrative English proficiency due to its high validity and readability. However, the majority of students in senior high schools consider the cloze test a difficult item to deal with. In this research paper, coherence and cohesion are taken as two perspectives to analyze the cloze test in senior high schools and some methods are found out to help the students to make a better performance in exams. To put it in another way, the author of this paper is determined to conduct an empirical research on this filed and he proposes three research questions on the cloze test:(1) Do senior high school students have a strong awareness of textual coherence and cohesion knowledge when they deal with the cloze test?(2) Are senior high school teachers aware of the importance of textual coherence and cohesion knowledge when they teach the cloze test?(3) Through the developing the awareness of textual coherence and cohesion, can senior high school students improve their accuracy rate in cloze test?Then the writer carries out a series of experiments to develop students'textual coherence awareness when they deal with the cloze test. After three months'experiment, the subjects in EG have made a great progress in the cloze test. The results show that the teaching of textual coherence and cohesion knowledge contributes much to the improvement of students'accuracy rate in cloze test in senior high schools.On the basis of the interview and thorough analysis of the findings derived from the tests, the author of this paper conclude that: 1. the main influential factor that led to students'failure is that both students and teachers have no awareness of the importance of the textual coherence and cohesion; 2. to teach the students textual coherence theory is an effective way to raise their awareness of textual coherent; 3. it is possible to improve students'accuracy rate of cloze test in high schools by teaching them the theory of coherence and cohesion. And the author also puts forward some practical suggestions to apply coherence and cohesion theory to cloze test so as to help improve ESL readers'cohesive awareness and reading ability. The author points out that it will be quite helpful to the students both in their performance in doing cloze test in senior high schools and in their English comprehension ability if they can make good use of coherence and cohesion knowledge.