An Investigation Of Students' English Discourse Competence In Senior High School

Cloze test is an important part in English tests in senior high school as it takes up 30% of the total points.However,students tend to be helpless in doing cloze test for that they lost points easily.It is found that discourse competence is one of the most influencing factors.Furthermore,through analysis of cloze tests in recent years NMET,test designers were inclined to test the knowledge of discourse competence.Discourse competence has drawn much attention both abroad and at home.Earlier researches focused on the definition of discourse competence,part of them defined from the aspect of competence,but most of them focus on discourse.The importance of discourse competence is stressed all along both abroad and at home,however,in China,the definition of discourse is varied and few researches revealed the current situation of senior high school students' discourse competence.This thesis aims to investigate students' discourse competence from discourse cohesion and coherence,and tries to find out:(1)students' performance on the components of discourse competence;(2)the correlation between students' discourse competence and their awareness of discourse competence;(3)the correlation between students' discourse competence and their English proficiency;(4)the difference of students' discourse competence between science class and arts class.Four instruments are adopted in this study,namely,a questionnaire of students' awareness of discourse competence,a discourse competence test,English proficiency test and cloze tests.Totally 120 participants from four different classes in senior high grade 2 were involved in this study.All the data were recorded in Excel and analyzed by SPSS 17.0.Descriptive statistics,correlation analysis and independent T-test are used in this study.The results are as follows.First of all,the total average score of the discourse competence test shows that students maintain relately low discourse competence with a polarized trend.Students performed worst on items related to lexical cohesion.Secondly,results show that students discourse competence is highly related with their English proficiency.The higher their discourse competence,the higher score they would get in English tests.Thirdly,no significant difference is displayed in the discourse competence between arts students and science students.The findings of this study reveal the current situation of students' discourse competence.Interestingly,the correlations reveal that both the multiple-choice cloze test and the rational cloze are significantly related with students' discourse competence.The findings also gave some pedagogical implications to teachers and students in cultivating and developing discourse competence.