A Study On Application Of Context Theory To Cloze Teaching In Senior High School

Cloze,as one of popular English test forms,is generally considered to be the test that can detect students' comprehensive use of language skills and so it has been widely used in various English tests.The purpose of the test is not only to test the basic knowledge of English language,but also to require students to comprehensively use various abilities from the perspective of the context of the article.However,during the internship,the author found that many of students are lack of context awareness and are accustomed to doing the exercises on the spot.They often regard each question as an independent individual,but the accuracy rate is very low.Meanwhile,from the daily communication with teachers,the author learned that when explaining the cloze,most of them are just on the topic,and rarely use context theory to analyze the topic.Therefore,how to improve the contextual awareness of students and teachers in the process of completing the cloze is a serious topic for high school teachers.On the basis of the context theory,this thesis draws on some relevant academic research results,through the experiment of cloze teaching,aiming to explore the influence of context theory on cloze teaching in high school,and to find out the teaching methods and learning strategies of cloze based on context theory,as well as to seek more effective ways to advance students' problem-solving ability and comprehensive using capability of language.The following research questions are put forward in this thesis:1.What kinds of learning strategies do students usually use when they do cloze exercises?2.How to apply contextual theory to the teaching practice of cloze exercises?3.Does students' ability of doing cloze exercises get improved after applying the context theory to it?In order to probe into the answers to the above mentioned questions,the research mainly adopts literature review,questionnaire,interview and empirical research,etc.Firstly,it summarized the current research situation of context theory at home and abroad as well as the theoretical basis of cloze test.And then the author presented the relationship between context theory and cloze by analyzing the five-year cloze tests in College Entrance Examination in JiangXi province.Next,In order to further demonstrate the effectiveness of context theory on cloze teaching,the author conducted a 14-week teaching experiment in a high school in JiangXi province,in which Class 8 and Class 9 of Senior two were selected as subjects and randomly designated as Experimental Class(briefly named EC)and Control Class(briefly named CC).Before the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire survey on the learning strategies adopted by all the subjects when they doing cloze exercises.The results showed that 78% of the students use the translation associative strategy,42% use the grammatical analysis strategy,and only 3% of them rely on the context theory.During the experiment,the EC implements the contextual teaching method to complete the cloze teaching,while the control class uses the traditional translation method.After three months,SPSS was used to analyze the test results of the two classes.It was found that the cloze problem solving ability of students in the EC was improved,and the cloze test results were significantly higher than the students in the CC.Finally,the thesis comes to the conclusion that students' ability of doing cloze exercises can be improved by applying the context theory to it.