A Study On The Difference Of English Cloze-Solving Ability Of Senior Three Students Based On Think-Aloud Protocols

Cloze test is considered to assess the integrated language proficiency of test takers.It is easy to implement cloze test and control its difficulty level,leading to its wide spread in all kinds of important English tests.The study of cloze has been widely conducted both home and abroad.However,there exist some problems.First,most of the studies focus more on cloze itself,less on the performances of test takers.Second,quantitative methods such as tests or questionnaires are used more often while qualitative methods based on test takers9 problem solving process are less used.Third,most studies are about cloze tests in College English Test(CET)rather than those in National Matriculation English Test(NMET).Considering the problems of senior three students and the insufficiency of previous studies,this thesis will conduct a comparative study on English cloze-solving ability of senior three students by using Think-aloud Protocols.This study measures students'cloze-solving ability by observing their ability of comprehending context information and recognizing and discriminating vocabulary.Therefore,three questions are raised in this study.What's the difference among different level groups in vocabulary recognition and meaning discrimination?What's the difference among different level groups in context information comprehension?What's the difference among different level groups in the usage of different level information?The subjects were 30 senior three students from a senior high school in Fuzhou,Fujian Province.They were randomly chosen from 4 classes.After the recording and data collecting process,Excel and SPSS 13.0 were adopted to analyze the data,and the following findings are concluded.First,in terms of vocabulary discrimination ability,there is no significant difference between high-level group and middle-level group while test takers in low-level group have insufficient vocabulary.Second,in terms of context information comprehension,with the increase of cloze scores,test takers have better performances.Third,in terms of the usgage of different level information,high-level group and middle-level group use more textual level information and high-level group performs better in using wider textual level information.By contrast,low-level group performs worse in the usage of textual level information,resulting from their insufficient language knowledge and weak discourse awareness.Moreover,low-level group refers to more clausal level information than the other two groups.All in all,this study attempts to reveal senior three students'ability of solving English cloze by using Think-aloud Protocols(TAPs).It is to give some inspiration to studies and teaching of NMET cloze test.