英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the research
With the development of the curriculum reform of English, the task of the Englishcurriculum in the period of foundational education is to make students master some basicknowledge in listening, speaking, reading and writing and develop students’comprehensive skills in using the language. Cloze is supposed to be one of the mosteffective and important means to examine the students English integrate skills, and hasbeen used widely in various tests especially some important examinations, such as theCollege Entrance Examination, CET-4, CET-6, TEM 4, TEM 8, TOEFL, NMET and so on.As the most popular test item in English tests, cloze examines not only the basicknowledge but also students’ comprehensive skills in using the language.However, the situation of cloze in senior high school is not optimistic. Althoughstudents have mastered a large number of vocabulary and profound grammar, they cannotdeal with the cloze satisfactorily. The main factor that lead to the students’ failure in clozeis the fact that many students just know the words’ meaning only in the textbook and lackthe awareness of the context. As a result, many students get into the bottleneck of lowscores. So it is necessary for teachers to cultivate students’ awareness of the context.Since Malinowski (1923) firstly put forward the context, many scholars have studiedthe context from different perspectives. They all deem that context plays an important rolein comprehending articles. Hence, the significance of application of context is clear. Nowthe context theory has attracted a lot of researchers’ attention, however, most of theresearch is about the application of the context theory to vocabulary, reading and grammar,and only a few studies focus on the application of the context theory to the cloze. Therefore,the author endeavors to apply the context theory to cloze in senior high school so that theteachers can explore the effective method, which may improve students’ learning strategiesin doing cloze and enhance the students’ cloze test scores.
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1.2 Purpose and significance of the thesis
It is well-known that cloze is considered as an effective way to examine students’comprehensive English skills and the score of cloze takes a large percentage in English testin College Entrance Examination. However, it is hard for students to get high score incloze, because students are lacking in the awareness of context in doing cloze. Malinowski(1923) claims that the meaning of the article is connected closely with its environment andthe exact meaning of utterance should be understood according to its context. Itemphasizes the importance of the context in understanding a text. The purpose of thisthesis is to help teachers find the most effective method, which hopes to improve students’learning strategies in doing cloze and then enhance their cloze scores.After reviewing the previous studies on the context theory and cloze at home andaboard, it displays that there are a few studies to explore the significance of the applicationof the context theory to the test item cloze in senior high school. During this research, thecontextual teaching method will be applied by teacher in cloze. If the research proves to beeffective, the contextual teaching method will help teachers get some enlightenment intheir cloze in the future and explore the most effective method, which will provide thetheoret