The Study Of Application Of Discourse Analysis In Cloze In National Matriculation English Test

It is universally acknowledged that National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is supposed to be an effective means to test the students' comprehensive English competence in which Cloze is the most workable due to its high validity and requirements. Cloze is designed to test the students' logical comprehension ability in specific context. However, the majority of students in high school consider Cloze the most difficult item compared with the other items. As a consequence, it's hard for the students to get a high mark. Drawing on the auther's long teaching experience, she concludes that the lack of discourse knowledge contributes a lot to the students' failure. So the author intends to discuss how to apply discourse analysis to Cloze in NMET, studying the significance and necessity of discourse analysis in practice for the Cloze test. It's hoped that students acquire some knowledge of discourse analysis with help of teachers, which may improve the students problem-solving skills and decrease the mistakes.The thesis outlines first of all the theoretical bases of Cloze as well as discourse analysis. Then the close relationship between Cloze and discourse analysis is described form the aspect of the features of Cloze design. The key to the thesis is to discuss how to apply the theory of discourse analysis to Cloze form the angles of macro-structure and micro-structure according to specific Cloze text in NMET, namely, we should first analyze the macro-structure and then micro-structure of the text. The former includes the background knowledge of the text and its genre and textual pattern, which can show the clue of the text and can also equip students with a clear thinking to understand it. With texts in different genres, the author discuss how to analyze different textual patterns—narrative writings, expository writings and argumentation writings. The latter includes analyzing the coherence and cohesion of the text, the textual information flow and so on. There are a variety of cohesion approaches, of which grammar cohesion, logic cohesion and vocabulary cohesion goes into in particular.Research methods used in this thesis are data analysis, questionnaire and experiment. Form the questionnaire, it is realized that the students perform poorly in Cloze test because of their lack of the knowledge of discourse analysis. A one-term experiment with two classes of Grade Three in Gangdu Middle School of Wuhan is carried out.The results of the final examination is feasible in actual and scientific data.The outcome of the experiment proved that it is a success to apply discourse analysis to Cloze test so that the students may improve their problem-solving skills and achieve a high accuracy.