Efl Learners’ Cognitive Strategy Use And Cloze Test Performance: A Study On Learning Strategy Of A Group Of Chinese High School Students

Cognitive strategy involves interacting with the material to be learned, manipulating the material mentally or physically, or applying a specific technique to a learning task(O’Malley & Chamot, 1990). The use of cognitive strategy may account for discrepancy in test-takers’ performance on cloze tests.This study explores the overall situation of high school students’ cognitive strategy use in a mc-cloze test regarding the effect of cognitive strategy use on the test performance. One hundred and fifty second-year high school students from two classes, with 56 girls and 94 boys, were invited. A questionnaire survey and a cloze test were used as the main instruments to collect data, along with a semi-structured interview to back up the quantitative findings.Findings from the study include:(1) Test-takers in the current study did not use cognitive strategies adequately;(2) A statistically significant and positive correlation, though weak, was found between strategies involving inferencing, deduction, repetition, translation and elaboration and the test performance;(3) The results from a two-way group-independence chi-square and an independent samples t-test showed that there was no significant difference between the high-score and low-score groups in the use of cognitive strategies concerning some questions(questions 1-4, see Appendix I). However, test-takers with good performance on the cloze test had reported a better command over cognitive strategies concerning questions 5-15 of the questionnaire than those with poor test performance. The limitations of the current study are discussed and suggestions for further research are put forward. Based on the findings, a set of suggestions for training are provided.