An Empirical Research Of The Relationship Between English Textual Awareness And Senior School Students’ ’ Cloze Test Performance

As an effective method to evaluate senior school students’ integrating language abilities, cloze test accounts for a large proportion in College Entrance Examination. However, cloze is a huge obstacle for most students in the exams, and many of them could not get high scores in the cloze tests. Therefore cloze tests draw great attention from many researchers, including the author. After plenty of exploration and analysis, the author finds most of their failure attributes to lack of textual awareness. In fact, studies about textual awareness dates back to 1950 and textual analysis and English teaching were combined since the middle of 1990 s. For the past few years, textual awareness has been widely applied in cloze tests, which greatly benefits students and teachers.However, the relationship between textual awareness and senior school students’ cloze performance is still unexplored and needs to be further probed into. Thus the author attempts to study this topic to prove the significance of textual awareness in cloze tests in order to encourage students to acquire knowledge of discourse with the assistance from teachers, which can enhance students’ examination scores.In this study, the author employs a questionnaire, Questionnaire of Textual Awareness of Senior Middle School Students, to explore the subjects’ textual awareness in English reading and some cloze tests are prepared to measure their cloze test performance. 120 senior students have participated in this research and this thesis aims to find answers to the following questions:1. To what extent are senior school students aware of discourse?2. What is the relationship between textual awareness and senior schoolstudents’ cloze test performances?3. What are the major factors of textual awareness that influences seniorschool students’ cloze test performances?The findings are as the following: some but not many of the students have a clear understanding of discourse concepts and there exists a positive relationship between textual awareness and senior school students’ cloze test performances and these results would offer inspirations for English learning and teaching.