| It is generally acknowledged that the Cloze test is a very integrated test which can not only examine students' linguistic knowledge but also reading comprehension skill and discourse analysis ability, thus, it can best reflect students' linguistic performance. So, the Cloze plays an important role in high school English exams. However, the majority of students consider the Cloze as the most difficult item compared with other items in exams. They spend much time on Cloze but it is still very hard for them to get high scores. Research shows that the lack of discourse knowledge attributes much to the students' poor performance on Cloze. Besides, in the teaching process of Cloze, through traditional grammar translation teaching methods, many teachers focus much on sentence level and ignore the guidance on discourse level for students, which accounts for students' poor scores on Cloze. As a result, the Cloze becomes a weak-point in both the student's learning and the teacher's teaching.The study abroad on discourse analysis started since 1950 s and from then on, Linguistic scholars represented by Harris, Halliday and Hanson have had a systematic study on discourse analysis. They continuously innovate and improve the relevant research on discourse analysis and make it an independent discipline. As the important parts of discourse analysis, the study on cohesion, coherence, context and genre appeals to many scholars. Afterwards, discourse analysis theory is attempted to be applied on language teaching fields and gets some achievements. From 1990 s the scholars at home have focused on discourse analysis based on our country's practical situation. In recent years, during the English teaching in high school and college, many scholars and English teachers gradually introduce the discourse analysis into classroom teaching so as to offer instructions on English reading teaching.This paper intends to apply discourse analysis to Cloze in high school English teaching. It is hoped that students can improve their problem-solving skills after acquiring some knowledge of discourse analysis with the teacher's help. The study intends to answer the following two questions:(1) What are the major difficulties for senior high school students when they are doing the Cloze ?(2) Can senior high school students' academic scores be improved after receiving a Cloze training based on the discourse analysis?The research instruments in the study include questionnaire, interview and teaching experiment. The study takes the students in Liulin Senior High School in Zhuoni, Gansu as an case study. 92 students from two classes of the Senior Grade Three participate in this study. The study process consists of questionnaire survey, teaching experiment, test of Cloze, data collection and analysis. The results of the experiment shows:(1) The major difficulty for senior high school students in doing Cloze are a lack of discourse consciousness and discourse analysis ability.(2) The application of discourse analysis to Cloze can improve senior high school students' problem-solving skills as well as get higher scores. The study also has some implications for both teachers and students in senior high school. Students should form good learning habits in doing exercises on Cloze as well as train their discourse analysis ability. In addition, they need to read as many reading materials as they can to accumulate their background knowledge on other cultures and traditions. Teachers are suggested to adopt discourse analysis methods to Cloze teaching instead of traditional grammar translation teaching methods in their teaching activities. Apart from giving lectures on language itself, teachers need to introduce students some background information on every aspects.The paper is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, which deals with the research background, purpose and significance of the study. The second chapter is literature review, which systematically introduces the research findings on both Cloze and discourse from abroad and at home. The third chapter is theoretical framework. In this chapter, the authors mainly elaborates three major theoretical basis of Cloze and the specific contents on discourse analysis. The fourth chapter is research design. This chapter introduces the research questions, subjects of research, research methods as well as research procedures. The fifth chapter is data analysis. In this chapter, the author collects data from the students' questionnaire, interview and also test results and then has an analysis on them. The last chapter is conclusion. This chapter first summarizes the study results of the paper and then provides some suggestions for teachers' teaching and students' learning in the future. |
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