An Empirical Study On The Application Of Cohesion Theory To English Cloze Test Teaching In Secondary Vocational School

Cloze test is one of the test items to test students’ comprehensive language ability as well as a compulsory item in Adult College Entrance Examination.However,in English examination,many senior high school students,especially secondary vocational school students,have low score in cloze test.Teachers also adopt some methods to help students enhance their abilities of doing cloze test items in English class.But the teaching effect is far from satisfactory.Therefore,it is necessary for teachers and students to find an effective method to improve their abilities of cloze test teaching and learning.Since the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,a large amount of attention has been paid to cohesion theory in modern linguistics.Some researches and experiments have proved that cohesion theory has a positive effect on English reading comprehension and writing.However,there are relatively few researches on the application of cohesion theory to cloze test.This study aims to explore the application of cohesion theory to cloze test,providing some references for cloze test teaching.Ninety students who came from Xi’an Railway Senior Vocational School and majored in electrification in Grade Three were chosen as the research subjects.They were divided into experimental class(EC)and control class(CC).A cloze test teaching experiment was conducted in the two classes,which lasted for one semester.During the teaching experiment,the experimental class employed cloze test teaching method based on cohesion theory,while the control class adopted traditional cloze test teaching method.To be concrete,this study employed qualitative and quantitative methods,including questionnaire,English tests,English cloze tests,cloze test teaching experiment as well as interviews,which aimed to answer the following three research questions:(1)What’s the current situation of English cloze test teaching and learning in secondary vocational school?(2)What are the differences in English cloze test scores between control class and experimental class after cloze test teaching experiment based on cohesion theory?(3)Does cohesion theory help students improve their abilities of doing cloze test items? If it does,in which aspects is cohesion theory helpful when students do cloze test items?The major findings of this research can be concluded as follows:(1)Before the cloze test teaching experiment,a large number of students have little knowledge of cohesion theory in secondary vocational school.Through the interview for teachers,it is found that teachers adopt some teaching methods to cloze test teaching.However,they seldom apply cohesion theory to cloze test teaching.(2)The results of Independent Samples T Test and Paired Samples T Test of the five tests indicate that: before the teaching experiment,there is no significant difference of the average scores between EC and CC in pre-cloze test.However,after cloze test teaching experiment based on cohesion theory,there is obvious difference of average scores between pre-cloze test and post-cloze tests in EC.Nevertheless,there is no significant difference of average scores between pre-cloze test and post-cloze tests in CC.These results show that cohesion theory helps students improve their abilities of doing cloze test items and enhance their cloze test scores.(3)After the teaching experiment,the majority of students in EC deem that cohesion theory can enhance the accuracy of cloze test and deepen their understanding of the text.Thus,compared with traditional English cloze test teaching method,the English cloze test teaching method based on cohesion theory helps secondary vocational school students understand the logic of the text and improve their cloze test scores.