A Study On The Application Of Cohesive Devices To Teaching Of English Cloze Test In Junior High School

Reading has been accounted for a larger proportion of English teaching in the middle schools. English cloze, as one of the main reading contents in English classes, is able to reflect the students’ integrated English skills. Therefore, the reading training for English cloze plays an important role in learning English. At present, the English cloze teaching is basically serving the examination, causing the teaching effect not to be so ideal. Teachers spend much time and energy in grammar structure and vocabulary teaching but neglect the analysis and comprehension of the text as a whole. Therefore it is in urgent need of teaching efforts for teachers to improve students’ all-round reading ability through the application of cohesive devices in the cloze test.Cohesion is one of the most important features of text. According to Halliaday and Hasan, the cohesion can be divided into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The grammatical cohesion includes reference, conjunction, ellipsis and substitution. Lexical cohesion consists of reiteration and collocation. Since many reading strategies are related to cohesion theory, this study, based on the previous researches, mainly explores the positive impact of the cohesion within text on the whole understanding of text. It aims to answer the following questions: “Can the students strengthen the awareness of using cohesive devices in cloze test?” And “Can the students improve scores of cloze test by the application of the cohesive devices?”The study lasts for three months, adopting contractive groups. Experimental class(EC) receives the training of cohesive devices in teaching cloze test and control class(CC) receives the traditional method. The data results of post-test in EC and CC shows that there is significant difference between EC and CC in the achievement and students’ scores of English Cloze test in EC is enhanced a lot. Based on the analysis of the questionnaire and interview, it can be testified that the students have the awareness of using cohesive devices to solve the problems in the cloze test. Meanwhile, because of the improvement of the scores in the cloze test, the students’ attitude towards the English cloze in EC becomes more active.The above findings are expected to offer reference for cloze test and reading teaching.