The Correlations Between Discourse Analysis And Cloze Test Scores Of Senior High School Students

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. Cloze has been widely employed in most large-scale tests as a necessary subtest, and it is also a part of NMET, accounting for twenty points in senior high school English test. However, most students said that cloze is the most difficult item to handle in the exams, and many students would lose a lot of scores in the cloze tests. Through investigations and analysis, the author finds that lack of discourse knowledge contributes a lot to their failure.The research on discourse analysis theory has started since 1950 and the combination of discourse analysis and English teaching was started since the middle of 1990s. In recent years, the application of discourse sense in Cloze test develops a lot. Students and teachers have got a lot benefits from the development. However, when carefully analyzing the investigations about the relations between discourse sense and Cloze test, the author finds that the major skeletons of these thesis and investigations are nearly same. All of them follow a same clue, that is: to find out that the theories of discourse analysis were seldom applied in Cloze tests of senior high school students- and to teach the students about the theories- and then to compare the Cloze tests scores of pre-teaching phases and post-teaching phases- and finally to demonstrate that the importance of discourse analysis teaching, and to show the importance of the cultivation of discourse senses. Without fail, those same-clue findings inspire the changes of teaching methods and enlarge teachers'knowledge about discourse analysis. But the demonstration experiment researches of the relations between the sense of discourse of senior high school students and cloze test marks were hardly to be found in the investigations. Thus the author intends to use the topic of the relations between the discourse analysis of senior high school students and the cloze test marks, to do some experiment researches on the relations between the sense of discourse and cloze test scores. Furthermore, the thesis intends to show the importance of discourse analysis in Cloze so as to inspire the students'sense of acquiring knowledge of discourse analysis with the help of teachers, which can definitely improve students'problem-solving skills and examination scores.Through the research experiment, the author designs seventy multiple choice questions concerning with the aspects of discourse analysis with some expert English teachers, to analyze the level of the students'discourse analysis. As for the experimental part of testing Cloze, the author plans to use ten English papers of NMET of recent years to test the students, which is to illustrate the concrete correlations between discourse analysis and Cloze test scores.The ingenuity of the thesis is to use demonstration experiment to illustrate the relations between discourse analysis and Cloze test scores. And the originality of the testing part is to design a series of representative discourse questions. Thus the application of discourse theories in concrete Cloze test analysis is a stiff project. Those recreational testing methods are a challenge for the author.In this thesis, the author tries to illustrate the concrete correlations between senior high school students'discourse analysis and Cloze test scores. This paper consists of four chapters. The first part includes the purposes and significance of the research, and also the academic part. In chapter one, the author concludes the integrative theories which were concerned and connected with discourse analysis. The author tries to illustrate some basic theories concerned about Cloze, and some features of Cloze test in NMET, and the application of discourse analysis in Cloze tests. Chapter two is the procedure of experiment research. The purposes of the experiment are to analyze the correlations between discourse analysis and Cloze test scores, to show in which level the students'discourse analysis influenced their Cloze test scores, to illustrate the representative factors of discourse analysis that influenced Cloze test scores most. Chapter three is going to analyze the results of the experiment part. The final chapter is to get some reflections and conclusions from the whole thesis. Because of some restrictions of the implements of the experiment, there must be some shortcomings and deficiencies. The author welcomes all kinds of opinions and comments of this thesis.