A Study On The Relations Between Reading Anxiety,Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Cloze Test Scores Of Senior High School Students

According to the National Curriculum for Senior High School, the fundamental aim of English course is to develop students' comprehensive language competence, and this competence can be effectively tested with cloze. Cloze test occupies an important position in English test, especially in the College Entrance Examination, and has a big influence on students' English scores. However, quite a few students do not have a good performance on cloze. Thus, many researchers have devoted themselves to the study of factors influencing cloze performance but they mainly focused on external factors related to text. Fewer researchers have focused on factors related to language learners themselves. As a matter of fact, learners' internal factors do make a bigger difference than external factors. Therefore, it is necessary to do research in internal factors' angle so as to improve learners' performance. There are many learner factors, among which the cognitive factors and affective factors play important roles in language learning. Reading anxiety is one of the important affective factors and tolerance of ambiguity, cognitive factors. Students' level of anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity may have impacts on their cloze scores. But how these two factors influence students' performance still remains unknown.Therefore, this study took students of a senior high school in Fuzhou, Fujian Province as the subjects, and investigated how learners' internal factors (reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity) influence cloze. Specifically, three research questions were put forward in the present study.1) Is there any difference between high-level cloze score group and low-level score group in reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity?2) Are reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity related to cloze test scores?3) Can reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity predict the variance of cloze test scores?All the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 13.00 and the main findings are as follows. First, the high-level cloze score group has lower level of reading anxiety but higher level of tolerance of ambiguity than low-level cloze score group. Second, there is a significant negative correlation between reading anxiety and cloze test score, while tolerance of ambiguity shows a significant positive correlation with cloze score. Third, reading anxiety can predict more variance of cloze score than tolerance of ambiguity.The present research revealed the relationship between reading anxiety, tolerance of ambiguity and cloze test score and gave some suggestions to teachers on English teaching.