Application Of Discourse Analysis In Cloze In National Matriculation English Test

According to The Syllabus of Senior English for China Students , English teaching in senior school aims at developing the students' integrating skills in using language. National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is generally 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. However, the majority of students consider Cloze the most difficult item to deal with among all the items. As a consequence, it's hard for the students to get a high mark. Lack of discourse knowledge contributes a lot to their failure. Therefore, this thesis intends to study the importance and necessity of discourse analysis in Cloze. It's hoped that students acquire some knowledge of discourse analysis with the help of teachers, which may improve the students' problem-solving skills.Research methods used in this thesis are analysis, citing examples, questionnaire and experiment. 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 revealed from the perspective of the features of cloze design. Cloze is designed to test the students' English competence beyond the terms of grammar or collocation level, while in discourse context. Next, the thesis discusses how to apply the theory of discourse analysis to the problem-solving process of cloze with special reference to such skills as cohesion and coherence, inter-sentential relation, context, text structure. Furthermore, by means of analysis of Cloze in NMET, points related to discourse context can be easily found in the test, which has an increasing tendency in proportion. Then, aided by students' questionnaire, the paper makes it clear that students' poor knowledge in discourse analysis leads to their low mark. The last section is a report of the experiment on discourse approach in cloze and its result analysis.One of the findings shows that application of discourse analysis in cloze test can help the students improve their problem-solving skills so that a higher accuracy can be achieved.