Research On High School Students’ Ability Of Applying Coherence Theory To English Cloze-Solving

Although text linguistics started late, it developed rapidly. It has been widely studied both in theory and application, but its application in the teaching of English in high schools is far from satisfaction. The objective of English teaching in senior middle schools is to help students form integrated language proficiency. Cloze test, which tests on students’ mastery of vocabulary, grammar and discourse knowledge as a whole, is widely used in all kinds of exams that aims at promoting students’ comprehensive language ability.Through observation and analysis of students’ English learning situation in her school, the author finds that students generally think it is hard to deal with the cloze test and some students even develop a fear of it. The main reason of this is that they have no concept of discourse and are unable to master the theory, let alone to solve problems by applying it. So, if students want to do a good job in the cloze test, they not only need to have the basic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, but also should have corresponding ability of discourse analysis.The setting of cloze test questions is mainly connected with coherence theory, which includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. By analyzing the cloze tests of National Matriculation English Test(NMET), the author finds that the items of cloze tests have close links with coherence theory.As a result, this research puts forward a hypothesis: “Can students improve their cloze-solving ability through learning the cohesion theory and skills?” The purpose of this paper is to apply coherence theory to solving the practical problems of students’ lack of cohesion theory and skills in learning English. By means of theoretical analysis and experimental proving, the thesis first expounds the main contents of discourse analysis and the features of cloze. Then it carries out a detailed analysis of the practical application of coherence theory combined with the cloze questions in the university entrance examinations. After that, the thesis aims to prove that using the coherence theory is helpful to improve students’ ability of cloze-solving. The relative experiment is carried out on students of two parallel classes, which adopts the comparing method between the experiment class and the compared class for comparative research.The research significance of this project lies in the efforts in which the author tries to combine coherence theory and cloze testing theories within cloze tests of NMET. By collecting and analyzing a variety of data from the experiment class, the author finds the solutions in the field of discourse and adopts the specific teaching method to enhance the students’ discourse consciousness, to help them form corresponding discourse analysis skills so as to promote the ability of cloze-solving, build up students’ problem-solving confidence and stimulate their interest in learning and autonomous learning ability.