| Multiple-choice cloze (MC-cloze) is the indispensible part of college Entrance Exam (CEE) of China because of its convenience and objectivity of evaluation at present. In 1970s, linguists of sociolinguistic put forward the concept of communicative competence which indicates language using not only requires making correct sentences based on grammar rules but the ability of putting these sentences into the suitable contexts. Some researchers such as Lardo, Dalell and Siwen conducted a series of correlation studies between cloze procedure and reading, TOEFL, English grade. Their study results show the higher correlation between cloze procedure and reading, TOEFL, English grade, which provide theoretical basis for cloze test being widely used in China and becoming an indispensable part of CEE at home. However, the study on cloze, especially the study of factors influencing cloze difficulty is lacking at home, that is why we conduct this study.This research based on Gestalt theory, Redundancy theory, Sociolinguistic theory and PEG. The purpose is to investigate the influence of text type, text topic, word class and deletion type on cloze difficulty. The four research questions are as follows: 1) Does text type (narration and exposition) have any influence on cloze difficulty? 2) Does text topic (an exposition with cultural background, an exposition with general knowledge, and an exposition with scientific information) exert any impact on cloze difficulty? 3) Do content word and function word have any influence on cloze difficulty? 4) Does deletion type has any influence on cloze difficulty? In order to answer these four questions, we carry out this experiment. one hundred and three subjects in Tianshui Number Two high school participate the experiment The testees are divided into three groups: group 1-high level, consisting of 34 subjects; group 2-medial level, made up of 40 subjects; and group 3-low level, formed by 29 subjects. Six cloze tests are chosen from CEE papers in the past five years, including three narrations and three expositions (exposition with cultural background, exposition with general knowledge and exposition with scientific knowledge). The experiment lasts for one week and the subjects were required to finish two cloze papers in thirty minutes every one day. The whole exam procedure obeys the requirement of CEE. Then we use SPSS to do statistical analysis. The results of the study are: First, cloze test in narrative form is much easier than the cloze in expositive form in MC- cloze form. Second, in expositive cloze, text topic plays an important role in determining cloze difficulty. Although there is no significant difference between three text topics, their difficulty can be arranged in the following: EMC with general knowledge is the least difficult and EMC with cultural background the most difficult, EMC with scientific information in between. Besides, EMC with cultural background has a relative high discrimination degree. Third, as to the content word and the function word items deleted in the six cloze tests, the function word form seems to be significantly easier than the content form. Forth, in MC cloze, intra- and inter- items have no significant influence on cloze difficulty.At the end of this thesis, the researcher tries to provide a few suggestions for the designers of cloze procedure and instructors in English: first, although this study results show that NMC is significantly easier than EMC, cloze designers should have a comprehensive consideration about other factors related the cloze difficulty because factors influencing cloze difficulty are various, such as deletion method (Fixed-rated, Rational, C-test), cloze type (MC-cloze, Banked cloze), scoring method (exact-word method and acceptable-word method), text topic and language proficiency, etc. Second, items remove from the text should have a balanced distribution in different discourse level (micro level and macro level). Third, in teaching practice, it would be better to improve the score of cloze test of the students if teachers help the students to analyze the structures and thought patterns of different text types.
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