The Application Of Discourse Analysis Theory In The Filling-in Of English Grammar In Senior Middle Schools

In 2014, the College Entrance Examination of the New English Curriculum replaced Grammar Multiple Choices with the Grammar Cloze. Grammar Cloze is an integrative test which can objectively reflect students' comprehensive language competence. The Grammar Cloze is a new test type, so students are unfamiliar with it and can't score much. Grammar Cloze requires students not only to master the necessary basic knowledge of English, but also to have discourse awareness and the knowledge of discourse analysis theory. Discourse analysis theory mainly includes cohesion, coherence, genre and context. However, through the pretest questionnaire survey, the author found that most students do not understand or just understand a little discourse analysis theory. Besides,in China the study of how to apply discourse theory to English test for high school students cannot be commonly found, while some researchers usually applied the theory of discourse analysis to reading comprehension and cloze test. In view of this, the present study will carry out some experiments to testify whether the application of discourse theory can improve high school students' competence in the testing type of grammar cloze.The subjects are 110 students of classes 15 and 22 in senior two from Lixin Senior High School in Anhui Province. The author carried out the application of the discourse analysis theory to the teaching of Grammar Cloze for four months to answer the following two questions: 1. Can the application of the discourse analysis theory to Grammar Cloze teaching develop students' discourse awareness? 2. Can the application of the theory of discourse analysis theory to Grammar Cloze teaching improve students' competence of doing Grammar Cloze? The research tools used to collect data are pre-questionnaire, post-questionnaire, pretest and post-test. The pedagogical experiment is applying the knowledge of discourse analysis to the teaching of Grammar Cloze and leading students to learn and use the knowledge of discourse analysis to do the Grammar Cloze exercises and tests. The author recorded the real data and analyzed it using SPSS Statistics 20.0. The experimental results show that discourse analysis theory can effectively improve not only students'discourse awareness, but also the students' competence of doing Grammar Cloze.