An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Theme-based Reading Comprehension Training On Senior School Students’ Cloze Test Performance

According to the New Curriculum Standards, The purpose of high schoolEnglish curriculum is to cultivate students’ ability of language use. With thedevelopment of language test, cloze test has become an important type of test item inNational Matriculation English Test (NMET) in that it undertakes the role of testingsome important language abilities, such as vocabulary, grammar and knowledgeabout the discourse analysis and it accounts for a relatively large portion---30points.Unfortunately, a majority of students regard the cloze test as the most difficult itemto deal with and tend to lose scores in this item most easily. Though a number ofresearchers have analyzed the cloze test, the researches are mainly on the propositionmethods and problem-solving strategies. The research on how to improve studentscloze test performance during the teaching process by means of experimentespecially the quantitative analysis can hardly be found. For this reason, the presentthesis first gives a brief introduction of the development of the cloze test and thenanalyzes the characteristics of the cloze test in NMET and students present situation,which reveals that students understanding of the theme of a passage plays animportant role. Based on the theory of frame, the author carried out the empiricalstudy and reached the conclusion that theme-based reading comprehension trainingin senior middle school can help students construct the frame related to a themeincluding words, logical relations, which can help them understand the wholepassage and improve their cloze test performance.It is hoped that this study will provide implications for both teachers andstudents. Teachers should transfer their attention from words and sentences to thewhole passage. The teachers should activate students frame of knowledge about thetheme and ask students to master relevant words and sentences, making preparationsfor the cloze test of the same theme. As for the students, they should grasp someskills in the cloze test. They should try to have a general idea of the whole passageand understand the theme by means of acquiring all the relevant background knowledge and common sense, which can help them understand the whole passageand improve their cloze test performance.