A Study Of The Relationship Between English Textual Awareness And Cloze Test Achievements Of Senior Middle School Students

With the implementation of the New Curriculum Reform, cloze test, considered as aquick, economic method of measuring overall language proficiency as well as readingcomprehension, is catching more and more attention mostly because of its highpercentage in College Entrance Examination. Many researches have been done to probeinto the importance of text knowledge in English teaching and learning. And it is widelyaccepted that text knowledge is very important for reading comprehension. However,researches on the relationship between English textual awareness and EFL cloze testachievements need to be further carried out and explored.This study aims to find out the relationship between textual awareness and EFLcloze test achievements of Chinese senior middle school students. A questionnaire,Questionnaire of Textual Awareness of Senior Middle School Students is to investigatethe subjects’ textual awareness in English reading and some cloze tests are to test theircloze test achievements.120students from Senior Three are chosen as the subjects inthe research. The author utilizes Pearson Correlation to explore the following researchquestions:1. What is the relationship between textual awareness and EFL cloze testachievements of Chinese senior middle school students?2. What is the relationship between textual awareness and text-based cloze testachievements of senior middle school students?3. What is the relationship between textual awareness and non text-based cloze testachievements of Chinese senior middle school students?The results are as follows: A significant positive relationship has been found to exist(r=0.352**) between the subjects’ textual awareness and their cloze test achievements.A significant positive relationship has also been found to exist (r=0.266**) betweenthe subjects’ textual awareness and their text-based cloze test achievements. Asignificant positive relationship has been found to exist (r=0.342**) between thesubjects’ textual awareness and their non text-based cloze test achievements as well.A surprising result has been found in the research that the correlation coefficientbetween the textual awareness and the non text-based cloze test achievements is a bit higher than that between the textual awareness and the text-based cloze testachievements, which means that students with high-level textual awareness can achievea bit better in non text-based cloze tests than in text-based cloze tests. The reasons arediscussed as follows: Firstly, students of high-level textual awareness may not put theirtext knowledge into full use or their textual knowledge may not help them deal with thetext-based cloze tests. This is why students of high-level textual awareness can notachieve well in text-based cloze tests. Secondly, if students do well in mastering Englishvocabularies, language and grammatical points, their progress in such non text linguisticknowledge may get their textual awareness enhanced in return in the course of Englishlearning. This explains why the correlation coefficient between textual awareness andnon text-based cloze test achievements is higher than the correlation between textualawareness and text-based cloze test achievements.This study is hoped to be of some significance for English teaching. Englishteachers in middle schools should realize the importance of textual awarenessdeveloping and aim to cultivate students’ ability of applying their text knowledge intoreading. Meanwhile, they also need to know that the cultivation of students’ textualawareness and the ability of applying their text knowledge into full use are on the basisof students’ good mastery of English vocabulary and language points to some extent.