An Investigation On English Cloze-Solving Of Senior School Students From The Perspective Of Linguistic Thinking

Cloze has been widely employed in most large-scale tests as a necessary subtest, and it isalso a part of NMET. However, in most students’ opinion, cloze is the most difficult item tohandle in the exams, and many students would lose a lot of scores in the cloze tests. Though thestudents mastered the basic grammar rules and the vocabulary required by The New CourseStandards of Senior English, and even know the exact meaning of each item to choose from andsome knowledge of discourse analysis, they can’t do well in the Cloze Test.Their poor performance suggests that the lack of English linguistic thinking contributes alot to their failure.Meanwhile, previous studies haven’t focused on the importance of English linguisticthinking and few empirical studies of the relations between English linguistic thinking of highschool students and their cloze test performance can be found. Thus the author intends to dosome empirical researches on English cloze-solving of senior high school students from theperspective of linguistic thinking.This thesis firstly reviews the domestic and foreign scholars’ relative studies of linguisticthinking through analyzing the achievements and limitations, and introduces the theoreticalfoundation, some basic theories such as English linguistic thinking, some characteristics oflinguistic thinking and the application of English linguistic thinking in Cloze tests. The researchquestions of the thesis are put forward as follows:1. What are the characteristics of English linguistic thinking of senior high school studentswhen they solve the problems in Cloze test?2. Can training of English linguistic thinking improve students’ problem-solving ability?In this study, two classes of students, total number113, are selected from No.1senior highschool of Juye as the subjects. Questionnaire investigation, interview, think aloud andcomparative experiment are used as research methods. The experiment lasted for three and ahalf months.After the experiment, the data were analyzed by Excel2003and SPSS. According to thestatistics, test scores of the experimental group are substantially higher than that of the control group, which shows that training of the English language thinking could improve students’problem-solving ability.Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, the following conclusions are drawn:(1) English linguistic thinking of Senior high school students has been selectively used,but the level is comparatively low.(2) There is significant correlation between English linguistic thinking and Cloze-solvingachievement.(3) Significant differences in training of English linguistic thinking do exist among groupsof high-score, medium-score, and low-score. The results of the students in high-score andmedium-score groups are better than that of the students in low-score group.Furthermore, the thesis intends to show the importance of English linguistic thinking incloze so as to inspire the students’ sense of acquiring English linguistic thinking with the help ofteachers, which can definitely improve students’ problem-solving skills.The ingenuity of the thesis is to use demonstration experiment to illustrate the relationsbetween English linguistic thinking and Cloze test scores. The application of English linguisticthinking in concrete Cloze test analysis is a tough project, which is a challenge for the author.Because of some restrictions of the implements of the experiment, there must be somelimitations and deficiencies in this tentative study. Further studies in this area are needed in thefuture.