The Application Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory To English Cloze Teaching In Senior High School

As we all know, cloze as a test type is employed to test students’ comprehensive ability. However, most students have usually performed badly on cloze in the exam. They often choose the answers from the perspective of grammar but not from the analysis of the internal relations in the whole text. So students’ comprehensive discourse ability fails to be improved and the validity of the type has been questioned. For this reason, it’s necessary to find a new effective method based on an authoritative theory to improve the cloze teaching and enhance the students’ comprehensive ability.The cohesion and coherence theory is mainly involved in the core of the textual analysis based on the ideas that the compositions of a text must depend on each other. Its implication has correlation with the one of cloze design bases. This thesis conducts an empirical study by applying the theory to the teaching of cloze so as to present a more effective and practical teaching method in cloze.The following research questions are proposed. 1. Is the teaching method based on the cohesion and coherence theory helpful to enhancestudents’ abilities of using the strategies in cloze? 2. Is the new teaching method more effective than the traditional one in improving clozescores? 3. After using the theory, which level of the students(top, middling, inferior) are improvedthe most in the experimental class?The research employs the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The students from two classes in No.1 Senior High School in Jinzhou are chosen as the research participants, who have nearly the same level in doing the cloze. During four months, questionnaires, interview, pre-test and post-test are required in the experiment. Both cloze test papers used are National Matriculation English Test papers(2012 and 2010 Liaoning). SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the corresponding data.The results show as follows: 1. The teaching method based on the cohesion and coherence theory is helpful to enhancestudents’ abilities of using the strategies in cloze. 2. The new teaching method is more effective than the traditional one in improving clozescores. 3. After the training, English middling students have improved the most in theexperimental class.In this study, although there are still a number of shortcomings that need further study, it is unquestionable that teachers should focus on cultivating the students’ consciousness and strategies of using the knowledge of cohesion and coherence to enhance their comprehensive competence.