Error Analysis On Cloze Test In Senior High School English

Since Wilson Taylor first introduced the"cloze procedure"as a measure for assessing readability of contextual materials in 1953, cloze and its varieties have been widely employed in most large-scale tests abroad and in China as a necessary subtest. It is also part of NMET and accounts for 20 points in the senior high school English test. However, many students do not feel ease at it and often attain lower marks in this testing item. It is considered the most difficult testing items to deal with and students often make mistakes when taking cloze test. In order to explore the nature of errors and to reduce the occurrence of errors, it is necessary to take an investigation and to make error analysis on cloze test, which is the focus of this thesis paper.This paper conducts an empirical study on error analysis on cloze test by using questionnaire, interview and protocol (think-aloud) techniques to collect data from students and teachers about cloze in senior high school. Besides, text analysis serves as another instrument to collect data of errors in cloze test. The text is taken from the first mock examination for college entrance examination within the context of Senior High School Attached to Northeast Normal University. Text results show that students'poor performance in cloze test can attribute to their weakness in communicative competence and comprehensive reading ability; some implicit factor are also figured out as sources to explain students'error in cloze, such as Chinese thinking model, affective factors etc. Based on data analysis, it is concluded that students should solidify basic knowledge, strengthen comprehensive reading proficiency as well as utilize flexible problem-solving skills so as to perform with a higher accuracy in cloze test.This paper only has done on error analysis by focusing on one piece of cloze text material within the context of one middle school in Chang Chun, which leads to certain limitation on exploring all errors sources. although the author suggest improvement of communicative competence to be a fundamental solution to reduce errors in cloze text, actually, further studies from this are extremely wanted to test its validity and practicability Therefore, there leaves more space to give deeper and wider studies on cloze test. Hopefully, this study can provide some practical data for further study and offer some inspiration for language teachers to become aware of errors in cloze test.