A Study Of Discourse Proofreading In National Matriculation English Test From The Perspective Of Deixis

Coefficient of difficulty has been low since error correction was a required item in National Matriculation English Test(NMET).The change of error correction is from lexical-grammatical to discourse proofreading,which aims to highlight the students’ discourse competence and communicative competence.The change gives a challenge to the English teaching of senior high school in China that traditionally attaches importance to vocabulary and grammar in error correction.The writer has found in the teaching that the traditional way of error correction results in students’ poor performance and low scores when they take the test item of discourse proofreading because of lacking deictic awareness and discourse analysis competence.Deixis,an important component in pragmatics,essentially concerns about the ways or positions in which language is used,and generally it links language use with particular context.Its grammaticalized features of context provide clues and ways for the interpretation of utterances and discourse.As deixis plays a crucial role in the production and comprehension of a text and discourse,raising students’ awareness of deictic expressions in English will be helpful to the development of their discourse competence.In literature review,however,there is little research in developing senior high school students’ deictic awareness in English teaching apart from the explorations of deictic application to some other fields.There is much rarer in the investigating in text or discourse study in high school,especially discourse proofreading in NMET.Therefore,this study makes attempt to prove that raising senior high school students’ awareness of deictic use in English teaching may improve their discourse analysis competence so as to break the bottleneck in discourse proofreading in NMET.The study is undertaken in the following steps.Firstly,through statistical and material analysis of National Matriculation English Test I(NMET(I))in the last five years,the deictic characteristics of discourse proofreading are explored.Secondly,to investigate the teaching situation,ten Englishteachers and ten students from No.1 senior high school of Wenshan city are interviewed before the experiment,and ten students from experimental class(EC)are interviewed after the experiment.Meanwhile,two questionnaires are used to investigate students’ deictic awareness and comprehension of discourse proofreading.Thirdly,the focus of deixis teaching is on the analysis of discourse proofreading in experiment class(EC),while traditional methods are still used in control class(CC).The statistics in the investigation indicates that deixis plays a great role in discourse proofreading in National Matriculation English TestI(NMET(I)).1)The deictic errors accounts for 70% in NMETI and students’ performance is relatively poor.2)Students lack deictic awareness.They prefer to use traditional methods to correct errors in discourse proofreading.3)By analyzing the statistics,it is obvious that there is the significant difference between EC and CC in the pretest and post-test after the experiment.It is proved that students’ deictic awareness and discourse analysis competence have been improved in the deictic study of discourse proofreading.The author believes that the study not only has some enlightenment for discourse proofreading teaching,but also has certain guiding significance for the improvement of high school students’ discourse ability and language communicative competence.