In senior high school, especially in Shandong Province, “Seven Options for FiveBlanks” reading comprehension, as the second section of the reading comprehension, isan important test type. With a total of 5 exercises, it is a full score of 12.5 points, eachwith 2.5 points. According to the English Curriculum Standards for General HighSchools of the Ministry of Education (2020), reading comprehension mainly examinesstudents’ ability to understand the written discourse, including the understanding and grasp of the discourse content and structure, as well as the analysis, explanation andevaluation of the discourse content. And “Seven Options for Five Blanks” reading, alsosentence reduction, is one of the specific exam forms.
Several sentences (such as five sentences) in the essay are extracted, and the othertwo sentences are placed with them together. After rearranging the sequences of them,the seven sentences are put after the essay to be chosen. Based on the content of theessay, the candidate will select the best sentence to fill in the blanks from the sevensentences after the essay. Two of the options are redundant ones. It mainly examines thestudents’ ability to understand the logical relationship of the context in the discourse.
2.2 Definition of Discourse
Generally speaking, Huang Guowen (2001) argues that, discourse can be definedfrom formal or structural perspective, and functional perspective.
In terms of the formal or structural aspect, discourse is a unit of language above thesentence. From the linguistic point of view, a morpheme is smaller than a word, a wordis smaller than a group or a phrase, and a phrase is smaller than clause, a clause issmaller than a sentence, and a sentence is smaller than a discourse. In practicalapplications, there are also cases where the discourse is represented by a word (or evena morpheme). For example, at the entrance to certain buildings, there are signs sayingENTRANCE. From the perspective of discourse analysis, this is a discourse, but itconsists of only one morpheme. Strictly speaking, this discourse is composed of asentence, this sentence is composed of a clause, this clause is composed of a phrase, thisphrase is composed of a word, and this word contains only one morpheme.
In terms of the functional aspect, discourse is language in use. From theperspective of language use, in the communication process, the meaning of language isdetermined according to context. The same language unit has different meanings indifferent contexts. For example, HEAD has various meanings in different contexts. Insentence A and B, two HEAD both are as the noun form. But it means the top part of the body in sentence A while it means the person in charge of the organization or companyin sentence B. In sentence C, acting as the verb form, it means going towards to aparticular place.
Chapter Three Methodology................22
3.1 Research Questions.................................22
3.2 Research Participants......................................22
Chapter Four Action Research Implementation......................27
4.1 Problem Identification.................... 27
4.2 Plan Making.....................................27
Chapter Five Conclusions........................66
5.1 Major Findings of the Research............................66
5.2 The Pedagogical Implications................71
Chapter Four Action Research Implementation
4.1 Problem Identification
When students handle the traditional reading comprehension questions, theyunderstand the details, make inference and judgement or summarize the main ideaaccording to the original text. The answers can be obtained in the original discourse.Compared with the traditional reading comprehension exercises, the passages of“SevenOptions for Five Blanks” reading comprehension are incomplete
