A Study On The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory To Cloze Test In Rural Junior Middle School

Discourse analysis is a relatively new item in the linguistic studies and itcrosses with many other fields. It has provided a lot of new insights into the processof language using, language learning as well as language teaching. While most of theresearches on the discourse analysis theories are about the reading and listening in themunicipal cities’schools and the researches only concern about the higher grades ofstudents. And it ignores the rural junior middle schools’students, the cloze tests andthe relationship between them. The title of this thesis is“A study on the application ofdiscourse analysis theory to the cloze test in rural junior middle school”. Theresearcher of this thesis elaborates a discussion on the application of some discourseanalysis theories into cloze solving in the rural junior middle school, and carries out aseries of questionnaire, interview and tests to investigate the effects of this newdiscourse analysis-oriented teaching method.As for the rural junior middle school, students here get involved in the clozetest for the first time. And it is the beginning for them to learn English systematically,and start to pay more attention to English study. As far as the teaching and learningpractice of English cloze test is concerned, for a long time, learners have beenfrustrated with obstacles from two main aspects, linguistic barriers and non-linguisticbarriers. However, the traditional teaching method is often the teacher-centered inwhich the teaching processes are mainly concerned with the vocabularies andgrammar. It lacks necessary feedbacks, which cannot spare enough room for students to activate their thinking. Learners often try to know the meaning of some separatedwords in their cloze solving process without making out the main idea or theimportant information of the whole cloze test. Therefore, it is likely that they can notachieve an effective result or any great improvement in their cloze doing practice evenafter a quite long period of training. In order to investigate the nature of cloze solvingprocess, the discourse analysis theories stress the analysis from the whole text, andpay more attention to the background information, the types and patterns of the clozetext. In this thesis, the author presents the application of some discourse analysistheories, even if not all of them should be worth trying by language teachers aiming attraining their students to become more efficient learners.She hopes that the application of discourse analysis theories to the cloze test inthe rural junior middle school will give teachers some pedagogical implications tocloze teaching, especially English teaching and improve the students’awareness ofapplying the discourse analysis theories into their studies.