On The Significance Of Discourse Analysis In English Teaching--From A Perspective Of Cloze Test

English is an essential communicative tool for the students in Vocational and Technical College. According to The Syllabus of VTC English Teaching, English language teaching aims at fostering the students' comprehensive English competence and ability to use it. In order to objectively evaluate this ability, cloze, a comprehensive test item with rather high validity in recent years, is very workable and effective. However, most students reckon that colze is the most difficult item to handle in the examination, and lose a lot of marks in it. The failure in cloze is mainly due to lack of discourse knowledge. Therefore, it becomes the title of this thesis "On the Significance of Discourse Analysis in English Teaching --From a Perspective of Cloze Test", and its importance and necessity in VTC English teaching will be discussed. It is hoped that this study will call the VTC English teachers' attentions to the importance of discourse analysis, helping them shift from the sentence-oriented approach to the discourse-oriented approach so as to "enhance" the students' comprehensive language competence.To attain its goal, this dissertation, by means of analysis, citing examples, questionnaire, interview and experiment, outlines first of all the theoretical bases and features of cloze, together with the differences between cloze and reading comprehension, and differences between cloze and multiple choice. Such differences mainly consist in the fact that cloze exists in discourse context, and it can help test not only grammar and vocabulary in the light of discourse context, but also many other points at the discourse level. Then aided by students' questionnaire and teachers' interview, the paper makes it explicit that in VTC English teaching emphasis is put on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary rather than discourse analysis, resulting in poor marks in cloze. It then discusses how to apply the theory of discourse analysis to the VTC English teaching indetail with special reference to such things as cohesion and coherence, inter-sentential relation, context and text structure. Its last part is the report of the experiment made on the sentence-oriented approach and discourse-oriented approach and the result analysis.The key points of this thesis are: A. Studying the features of cloze test and the main causes of students' errors in the cloze test. B. Applying discourse analysis to VTC English teaching, in order to strengthen students' discourse analysis and improve their comprehensive language ability. The original ideas of this paper are: studying the features of the cloze test and the main causes of students' errors in the cloze test to analyze the relation between cloze and discourse, putting the theory of discourse analysis into the practice of cloze test. One reason for doing so is that most researches on cloze are often carried out from the perspective of test focusing on its validity and reliability both at home and abroad, without much done on the relation between discourse analysis and cloze.In the end, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the discourse-oriented approach should be strengthened in VTC English teaching because it can help the students learn grammar and vocabulary in the discourse context, get to know the communicative function of the sentences in discourse, understand the text structure and finally develop the comprehensive language competence and enhance the students' ability in cloze.