The Study On Test-taking Process Of The New HSK Band 4 Reading Test Based On Think Aloud Protocol

With the rapid development of Chinese language internationalization,the phenomenon of “the Craze for Chinese” is warming up accordingly.As a large scale and standardized test for the Chinese proficiency of non-native Chinese speakers,the new Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi(HSK)has been increasingly researched these days.As a crucial reference when foreign students apply for the opportunity to study in China,the New HSK Band 4 is favored by foreign candidates.In this thesis,three research questions are to be addressed: Firstly,the reading mode participants adopted when processing the reading tasks.Secondly,the similarities and differences of reading strategy use by the participants in New HSK 4 reading test.Thirdly,whether the selection of reading strategies is related to the question type.Think Aloud Protocol and a retrospective interview method are followed in the present study and data are collected from four Thai Chinese learners of medium-level Chinese proficiency when they are processing the New HSK 4 reading task.The research goes on like this: first,think aloud and interview are carried out and recorded throughout.Then,the recorded data(think aloud data and interview data)are transcribed carefully.Next,data coding which coded the data into different strategy categories following a well-recognized reading strategy framework is conducted.Then statistical analysis is conducted to analyze the data.The main findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,students tend to adopt "bottom-up" model in reading process which may hinder their overall text understanding.Secondly,it was found that some subordinate sub-reading strategies did not help understanding too much.To be specific,by comparing the total frequency and the mean frequency of reading strategies' using,it suggested that students attached great importance to the understanding of local information instead of the global meaning;through analyzing the use frequency of reading strategy in each category,it can be seen that students lack the awareness of understanding the structure of the article and are unable to analyze it.Thirdly,after analyzing the strategy frequency of the students,it was found that there are individual differences in reading strategy use even for students of the same proficiency level.Fourthly,it is found that students always employ different reading strategies in solving different types of questions,and there are certain corresponding relationships between question type and strategy use.According to the aforementioned research findings,the author puts forward pertinent suggestions for the New HSK reading teaching practices and for the reading test preparation.