The Application Of Coherence Theory To Theteaching Of Cloze Tests In Junior Middleschools

In the Entrance Examinations to Senior Middle Schools in recent years, cloze test has become an important part to test students on their reading comprehension and their ability to use the basic knowledge in terms of discourse. However, students generally have great trouble in solving cloze. They regard it as the most difficult part in English examinations, and most teachers in junior middle schools at present still lay emphasis on vocabulary and grammar in their teaching. They haven't paid enough attention to the importance of discourse. This situation directly leads to students'unawareness of discourse knowledge. So it's necessary to introduce cohesion and coherence theory into the teaching of cloze test.Since cohesion and coherence was first proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,there have been many studies on the application of this theory to language teaching and language learning. This thesis has conducted an empirical study by applying cohesion and coherence theory to the teaching of cloze test in junior middle schools. In this thesis, the writer first has a review of literature on the cloze procedure, and then an experiment was carried out to apply the cohesion and coherence theory to the teaching of cloze test. After about three months'experiment, it is found that the subjects in the experiment class have made great progress in their examinations. The result shows that the teaching of cohesion theory contributes much to the improvement of the subjects'ability to deal with cloze tests. This study has proved that applying the cohesion and coherence theory to the teaching of cloze tests is an effective way to improve the students'textual comprehension and at the same time raise their overall language ability.