The Correlation Between English Learners’ Discourse Awareness And Their Cloze Test Performances In NMET

In English examinations, cloze test is a popularly essential testing technique inwhich English learners’ reading comprehension, lexical competence, awareness offormulaic expressions and appropriateness of grammatical knowledge are globallytested from the aspect of discourse. In New Standard of Curriculum for high school, itclearly states that the purpose of the cloze test is to train and cultivate students’communicative competence in using English. In addition, Cloze test, as one of thetesting techniques in National Matriculation English Test (NMET), accounts for20%of the total score for English subject. It indicates that the test is of great importance toEnglish learners in senior high school.However, the author of the thesis finds in her teaching practice that, eventhrough too much time and energy are devoted to practicing cloze tests, the results arenot so favorable and students still feel it thorny to deal with the test in Englishexamination. Even those students who have a good command of English vocabularyand grammar knowledge can’t perform very well in the test, especially for the itemswith their options dependent on the contexts, which suggests the reason for theproblem is that students may lack the discourse awareness, such as the awareness ofgrasping the cohesion and coherence of a discourse or text. As some words andphrases are dug out for the blanks, cloze test is a fragmentary text if it is read sentenceby sentence. Only by reading the whole passage and uniting the main idea underlyingthe passage can the test takers find the right answers to fill the blanks in cloze test.Because of that, discourse awareness and discourse competence are two importantfactors for English learners to handle cloze test. Therefore, this paper attempts tostudy the correlation between English learners’ discourse awareness and cloze testperformances by investigating some students of a senior high school as researchsubjects.The research methods adopted in the thesis are literature review, theoretical analysis, questionnaire survey and testing. The procedure of the research was to beginwith doing literature review on the study of discourse awareness and cloze test athome and abroad. Next, the theoretical foundation on cloze test and discourseawareness was elaborated. Then, the investigation of140students in a senior schoolof TengChong County where the author works was undertaken. In the survey, thestudents were first demanded to finish two cloze tests selected from the former NMET.Second, the students were required to do a questionnaire on their discourse awareness.With these two methods, the author is meant to probe into the correlation between thestudents’ discourse awareness and their performances in the cloze test.It has been found in the study that most of the students possess some discourseawareness. It is also illustrated the correlation of the students’ discourse competenceor awareness with their performances of the cloze test in the research. However, whenthe items are involved in context and substitution, students tend to fail to deal withthem. On the basis of the problems found in the study, along with the latest researchachievements and the teaching experience as well, the author has put forward someimplications and suggestions for senior high school English teaching.