The Research On The Application Of Context Theory To Cloze In Senior High School

As a popular test item,cloze can reflect students' comprehensive language competence objectively.With the reform of the new curriculum,cloze becomes more and more flexible and varied which examines not only the basic knowledge of words,phrases and grammar,but also students' context awareness.Many researchers believe that context plays a crucial role in comprehending exact meaning of the text.However,most of students are lack of the ability of taking advantage of the contextual clues to analyze cloze texts.Consequently,most of students consider cloze as the most difficult item to handle and get into the bottleneck of low score.This thesis will apply contextual teaching method to English cloze.It is hoped that this research can find an effective method to help students enhance their learning strategies in doing cloze and improve their cloze test scores.The following research questions are put forward by the thesis:Q1: Can students' learning strategies in English cloze be improved through the teaching method based on the context theory?Q2: Can students' scores in English cloze be enhanced through the teaching method based on the context theory?The teaching research is carried out in Liaoning Province Shiyan High School for sixteen weeks and a total of 104 students involve in this research.The experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC)that have the similar level in cloze are selected through the results of their final test.In EC,the contextual teaching method will be adopted,and the linguistic context and non-linguistic context are involved.While the Grammar Translation Method,one of the traditional methods,will be applied in CC.Quantitative analysis(Questionnaire and Test)and qualitative analysis(Interview)are taken in the experiment.And the data of the experiment are analyzed by SPSS19.00 to testify the research questions.The results of the research show that there are differences between EC and CC in learning strategies in doing cloze.The data display that students' learning strategies in doing cloze can be improved through the new teaching method.The change mainly focuses on cognitive strategies and affective strategies.For the meta-cognitive strategies,there is only a little change.And the students' cloze scores are improved after the contextual teaching.The context theory is beneficial to English cloze.However,the research still has some limitations,which should be considered in future research.