Study Of Cloze Test In English Exams For College Students Based On Cohesion Theory

As an essential part in discourse analysis, cohesion has always played a vitalimportant role in the organization of a text. Ever since M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasanpublished Cohesion in English in1976, many attentions have been paid to cohesiontheory in modern linguistics. Systemic-functional linguist M.A.K Halliday deems thatwhat a text is termed as a text lies in its texture which is realized by cohesive relations.Halliday and Hasan category cohesive devices into five groups: reference, substitution,ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion and give a detailed discussion on each ofthem. The research that is done by Halliday and Hasan is of vital importance in thefoundation of cohesion theory. This thesis first reviews relative studies which hasbeen done by scholars at home and abroad on cohesion theory over half a century.Generally speaking, foreign scholars focus their attention on cohesion theory itselfand the relationship between cohesion and coherence; while researchers in ourcountry mainly concentrate on the classification of cohesive meaning and on theexploration of cohesive devices. Meanwhile, scholars in our country apply cohesiontheory into foreign language teaching, flourishing its applied study.Through the review of relative studies on cohesion theory abroad anddomestically, the author finds out that the researches have been carried out fromdiverse angles: from Halliday and Hasan’s model to Widdowson’s illocutionary acttheory model then to Brown&Yule’s mental framework model; from Halliday andHasan’s classification of cohesive devices to Hu Zhuanglin’s multi-level thought ofcohesion then to Zhang Delu’s cross-type cohesion. Each model has its own linguisticfoundation. And previous researches have showed that cohesion theory is helpful in language reading education and language writing education. Little research has beendone in the application of cohesion theory in cloze test and the study on cohesivedevices of various genera and text types is lack of qualitative and quantitative research.So the author of this thesis tends to combine cohesion theory with cloze test in collegeEnglish test, discussing the relationship between high-frequency text types and itscorresponding cohesive devices.It is widely acknowledged that Halliday and Hasan are the founders of cohesiontheory for their detailed studies on cohesion and great contribution to this field.Therefore, this thesis will adopt Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion model as basis toanalyze how reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion aredone in cloze test. The research question involved in this thesis is as follows:This thesis tends to carry out a comprehensive analysis and study on thirty clozetests from three angles including text types, cohesive devices and its realizations,trying to states practical functions and implications that research findings of this studyto the teaching and learning of cloze test.The corpus is made up of thirty authentic papers of cloze tests in the latest tenexams of TEM-4(Test for English Major Bend4), CET-6(College English Test Bend6), and NEEP (the national entrance examination for postgraduates). Through theanalysis in the corpus, the author concludes high-frequency text types and itscorresponding cohesive devices and achieves statistics with the assist of SPSS.The statistics proves that the high-frequency text types in the corpus are narrative,exposition and argumentation among which exposition and argumentation account fornearly90%of the total. No matter what text type is, lexical cohesion always takes upthe highest ratio among cohesive devices in college English test and ellipsis is notapplied in the blanks of cloze test at all. Meanwhile, the application of reference andsubstitution to blank items in narrative is much more frequent than in argumentationand exposition. Concerning conjunction in the corpus, temporal conjunction tends toappear in narrative while additive, adversative, and causal conjunction clines to beapplied to exposition and argumentation. Through the analysis of the corpus, theauthor hopes that test-takers may take text type element into consideration in interpreting a text and be of clear awareness of certain cohesive devices in each texttype so as to get a better understanding in doing cloze test.As a tentative research on cohesion theory, the procedure of this thesis isinevitably affected by the author’s subjective elements and due to various limitationssuch as research scope and short time, the result may not be perfect. As one essentialcomponent in discourse analysis, many valuable aspects of cohesion theory areworthy of being studied, for example, the research on cohesive devices in certain texttype can be carried out in further studies.