An Analysis Of Grade Nine Students’ Answers To Written Discourse Completion Test

Since Hymes first put forwards the concept of communicative competence"in1972, the goal of language teaching has been shifted to developing language learners’ communicative competence. At the same time, communicative competence is also introduced into language testing which makes the emphasis on language form and grammar to the meaning and function of language. Whether these changes can have good effects on learning and teaching is uncertain. There needs a further study to research. In this thesis, the author chooses to study the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT). At first, Levenston used it to test the level of English to Canadian. And then in1982, Blum-Kulka applied it into the study of speech act and compared the native and nonnative speech act in languages:American English, British English, Australian English, Danish, Canadian French, German, and Hebrew. In the process of summarizing the collecting methods, the representative, Kasper once pointed out that "DCT is the common method to collect data in the cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics". Nowadays WDCT is a common type of language testing in the junior school to test the language communicative ability of students.The aim of this study is to find out the main problems existing in the present communicative language test and discover solutions so as to provide some useful suggestions for educators. Research questions are as follow:(1)What are the main problems or errors while answering the Written Discourse Completion Test?(2)What are the factors influencing the existing problems in answering the Written Discourse Completion Test?In this study, it applies the language test, questionnaire for teachers and students, classroom observation and interview into the653students and11teachers of Grade Nine in the Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University. The procedure is as follow:first, to collect data about Written Discourse Completion Test to students of Grade Nine in order to collect and analyze data; The data are chosen from the part of WDCT in the Midterm Test. Second, to make a survey through questionnaire for teachers and students to collect data. The subjects are four classes from all the classes and eleven teachers. The questionnaire for students includes five parts which are their interest and motivation towards English, the understanding of the WDCT and problems they usually meet and the comprehension about the focus of teaching in the class. The questionnaire for teachers consists of the understanding about the mastery of the required ability of junior students in the English Curriculum Standards(2011), the nature of WDCT and existing problems which students are easy to make and the WDCT’influences in daily teaching; Third, to make classroom observation. This step aims to find out the influence in developing students’ communicative ability through observing activities used in the class and whether students take actively in the activities and use English to communicate with their partner in the class; Fourth, to make an interview. And twenty students are interviewed. It aims to collect students’attitude toward WDCT and their problems they often meet when they answer this type of test.To sum up, the result of this study shows that,(1) the errors that students meet in answering the WDCT follow this order:Discourse error (35.6%), grammar error (17.8%), Chinglish (17.1%) and lexical error (15.9%); High score students are easy to make errors in the following way:substance errors, lexical errors, Chinglish, grammar errors and then discourse errors while Low score students make errors in this way:discourse error, grammar error, Chinglish, lexical error and then substance error.(2) the factors influencing the answering the WDCTs are,(a) the influence of teachers. There are many aspects, such as, How to design the interesting classroom activities and encourage students take part in them, to what degree teachers use English to teach students in class;(b) the influence of students themselves. Their motivation in learning English, comprehending WDCT and the scoring criteria and the using correct strategies in answering WDCT influence the correctness of answering WDCT;(c)the influence of mother tongue. Students are familiar with the thinking pattern and the rules of mother tongue and therefore when they do the WDCT, they are easy influenced by these factors;(d) the influence of target language; students do not master the systemic knowledge of second language and make errors because of using incomplete rules, ignoring the rule of restriction and so on. Besides that, the study also finds that high score and low score students have a difference in using the taught strategies in answering the test.The implication of the thesis for English teaching in Junior School is that teachers not only need to analyze the problems existing in the communicative language testing and teach the solutions for answering the kind of test but also need to make students practice more taught strategies in the daily teaching.