An Experimental Study On Discourse-based Instruction In Developing Senior High School Students’ English Cloze Test Discourse Structure Analysis Ability

The National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017 Edition 2020 Revised Version)stresses the importance of discourse,which points that the discourse carries linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge,conveying cultural connotations,value orientations and way of thinking.Therefore,discourse is not only the carrier of linguistic knowledge but also provides platforms for students to develop learning strategies,train the language skills and cultivate the cultural awareness and think capacity.However,no satisfactory results were presented in English cloze test,one of the important forms to check students’ comprehensive linguistic competence in NMET,owing to the outdated teaching method and teachers’ neglect of skills training.Therefore,an appropriate teaching method designed for cloze test is of extreme urgency,which received considerable critical attention.Discourse-based Instruction(DBI),as a teaching model,shifts the teaching focus to the discourse level,advocating a discourse-around teaching design and implementation.It suggests that the acquirement of linguistic knowledge and the cultivation of language competence are integrated into the discourse.Besides,according to the framework of test validity,the item settings for cloze test are mainly at discourse level,which is in high coincidence with the idea of DBI.What’s more,a large number of scholars have proved the positive influence of the application of DBI in English reading teaching but little has been done in the field of cloze test.The existing researches of the combination of both laid stress on the improvement of students’ academic performance not on the enhancement of the ability.Therefore,the author applies DBI in cloze teaching to verify its effect on three kinds of ability derived from discourse structure analysis ability,namely,reference analysis ability,lexical cohesion analysis ability as well as coherence analysis ability.According to NECS(2017 Edition 2020 Revised Version),the former two belong to micro structure analysis of discourse and the last one is classified as macro structure analysis of discourse.Based on the theory of Discourse Analysis,the author selected the theory of context and the theory of textual genres and patterns as theoretical foundations for the macro structure analysis and chose the theory of cohesion and coherence in the micro perspective.Besides,the theory referring to psychology and information is also introduced to construct the relation between cloze test and discourse.Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed in this study.One hundred and three students in two pillar classes of Grade 12 in a senior high school in Wuan of Hebei Province are selected to join in the teaching experiment lasting for three months.The research instruments include a pre-test,a post-test,an interview for students.Besides,an investigation of National Matriculation English Test(NMET)cloze tests from 2017 to 2021 in Hebei Province composed of the analyses of thematic context and textual types,distribution of test points as well as the test validity are also shown to help learn about the characteristics of NMET cloze test.In the pre-experiment phase,the pre-test is held to verify whether there exists obvious differences between the control class(CC)and the experimental class(EC).In the while-experiment phase,twelve lessons are designed for cloze training.The DBI mode is employed in the EC while the PWP mode is adopted in the CC.After the experiment,the post-test is held in two classes and twelve students are selected from higher level,intermediate level and lower level respectively according to their academic performance in the post-test in the EC to conduct an interview for their attitude and suggestions towards cloze test and DBI mode.What’s more,the data from two tests are collected,processed and analyzed in the database by SPSS 26.0.Result of interview is recorded and translated into English.The results are as follows.Firstly,DBI can effectively improve students’ reference analysis ability.Students can match subjects and behaviors well by utilizing the pronoun reference.Secondly,DBI yields remarkable influence on students’ lexical cohesion analysis ability especially in reiteration analysis compared with collocation analysis.They keep high sensitivity for some repetitive words,synonyms,antonyms,etc.Thirdly,DBI is productive in strengthening students’ coherence analysis ability.They can infer the unknown information by quick extraction of existing information.