A Study On The Relations Between Linguistic Competence And Cloze Test Scores Of Senior High School Students

Cloze is an important test form in English tests,which combines multiple choices with reading comprehension.In dealing with cloze,students are required to choose the proper words to fill in the blanks in the text to make the whole passage complete.The words in the text are deleted in some proportion.The purpose of cloze is to test students’comprehensive abilities of using foundational knowledge of English.Many linguists and English teachers have studied cloze test before.They found that cloze test aims to examine students’ reading competence,analytical judgment ability and the abilities of using vocabulary and grammar knowledge.Cloze test occupies an important position in English test.But the test is so difficult that students often lose a lot of scores in it.As a result,students are afraid of cloze test,which in return produces a negative effect on students’ achievement in cloze test.Again and again,this has developed into a vicious circle.So how can we change the situation that students score low in cloze test?Why can some students get high scores with others getting lower scores under the same conditions in school?What factors affect cloze scores,and how?These questions are worth investigating.Some scholars have investigated the questions before,but most of the studies focused on factors related to text.Few of them focused on students.Besides,previous studies mainly explored the effect of single factor rather than comprehensive effects of factors combined.In order to make up the gap of previous studies,this thesis tried to explore the effects of learners’ linguistic competence factors,including reading competence,grammar competence and vocabulary competence that influence the cloze scores.Specifically,three research questions were put forward in the present study:1)Are students’ reading competence,grammar competence and vocabulary competence related to cloze test scores?2)Are there any differences between top students and poor students of cloze scores in reading competence,grammar competence and vocabulary competence?3)To what degree can students’ reading competence,grammar competence and vocabulary competence predict the variance of cloze test scores?All the data were analyzed with SPSS and the main findings are as follows:All the three learners’ linguistic competence factors have a close relationship with cloze scores,and reading competence has the closest relationship with cloze scores;there are significant differences between top and poor students of cloze scores in the three factors;reading competence and grammar competence can predict the variance of cloze score,and reading competence can predict more variance of it;vocabulary is the weakest predictor.The present research is a preliminary exploration on the relations between learners’linguistic competence and cloze scores.It aims to investigate the patterns of relations between them and try to give some suggestions to English teachers about teaching and contribute to reaching the goal that students can get high scores in cloze test.