Research Of Applying Discourse Analysis To English Cloze-Solving

In the past thirty years, people showed more and more interest in the research of linguistics of discourse and as a linguistic unit beyond single sentences, discourse has been widely studied from the aspects of theory and application. Of all the items, cohesion and coherence, style and mode, context of texts are getting more and more attention from experts at home and abroad as the most important parts of discourse. However, the application of discourse theory is not so satisfactory in the field of English teaching especially in the period of senior English teaching.According to The Syllabus of Senior English for Chinese Students, the task of English curriculum in the period of foundational education is to make the students master some basic English knowledge in listening,speaking,reading and writing and develop the students' integrating skills in using the language. As an important way to examine whether the students have mastered these skills, Cloze test has been applied to a variety of large-scale tests like CET-4,CET-6,NMET, etc. 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 in testing from the aspects of vocabulary,grammar and discourse. So it is also called "reading comprehension with obstacles". However, the majority of students consider Cloze the most difficult to deal with among all the items. As a consequence, it's hard for the students to get a high mark. Based on years of experience of teaching English in senior schools, the author finds that lack of discourse knowledge contributes a lot to their failure.Discourse awareness refers to taking the contents and structure of texts into consideration while reading. Cloze test is a kind of discourse with a vacancy of some information after some words are deleted on purpose. To perform well in Cloze, the students should have a good knowledge of grammar and vocabulary as well as the comprehensive capacity of vocabulary-memorizing,fast-reading,structure-analyzing and information-dealing. The former English teaching mainly focus on the isolating and static analysis of single sentences rather than the whole text. So the problem the English teachers must solve now is how to find out the most effective teaching method to improve the students capacity of discourse analysis.The significances of this thesis are: first, it discusses how to apply the theory of discourse analysis to the problem-solving process of cloze from the aspects such as cohesion and coherence,context,text styles and modes. Second, by doing experiments in English class, it tries to test the feasibility of improving the students' problem-solving skills in Cloze and reading comprehension by carrying out the teaching method of discourse analysis in class.By the means of theoretical analysis and experimental proving, the thesis first summarizes the features of Cloze and the main contents of discourse analysis. Then it describes how to carrying out the teaching method of discourse analysis in senior English class. The relative experiment is carried out on some students of Grade Two in Wuhan No 6 senior school. The results of the experiment shows that the students' skills of problem-solving can be greatly improved if the teachers cultivate the students' concept of discourse and guide them to analyze the test of Cloze from the aspects of macroscopic and microscopic structures, so it is worthwhile to apply this method to senior English class. However, the research is to be improved and perfected in the future teaching.