A Study On The Effects Of Reading Strategies On Cloze Test Performance Of Senior High School Students

As early as 1957,Taylor put forward cloze test to test language learners' reading ability and language proficiency.Afterwards,cloze test was widely adopted by researchers at home and abroad to measure second language learners' reading ability and second language proficiency due to the fact that they regarded cloze test as a highly effective and useful test form.Meanwhile,reading strategies had been conducted to investigate EFL learners' reading characteristics and reading habits.Relevant research findings declared that the employment of reading strategies was an important way to gain good performance in reading comprehension.Besides,previous research findings deemed that reading strategies,to some extent,can impact students'cloze test performance,but empirical studies on which reading strategies that were commonly chosen by senior high school students in doing cloze tests and whether these reading strategies can effectively promote students' cloze test performance are still insufficientIn view of the above,on the basis of previous relevant studies,the present study aimed at examining senior high school students' awareness of reading strategies and exploring the effects of reading strategies on their cloze test performance.Participants of the present study were 86 students from two parallel classes in senior one in Machong Senior High School,Dongguan,Guangdong province.This study adopted cloze test as the test form due to the fact that cloze test was usually considered as an efficient way to measure test-takers'reading ability and language proficiency.Before the experiment,a cloze test was carried out to test students'reading ability and language proficiency.Then in order to figure out students'overall employment of reading strategies,the questionnaire closely followed the first cloze test.The results from pre-test and the questionnaire showed that the two classes were two parallel classes with the same level of language proficiency and reading strategies employment.Therefore,the two classes were taken as the experimental class and the control class.The experimental class received reading strategies instruction while the control class still received the routine instruction.After the experiment,the two classes took a cloze test and the questionnaire again.The whole experiment lasted for 16 weeks.All the data from the experiment were collected and analyzed by social science statistics software SPSS 17.0.Then findings from the present study were as follows:Firstly,students had the awareness of using reading strategies with different levels in completing their cloze tests.Before the experiment,they tended to use inference and note-taking strategy,which both belong to cognitive strategies.After the experiment,they preferred to apply cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies to their cloze tests.The employment of social-affective strategies stayed at a low level.Secondly,there was a positive relationship between reading strategies employment and students' cloze test performance.After reading strategies instruction,students in the experimental class gained higher scores in post-test than before and their awareness of employing reading strategies increased to a higher level than before.Besides,in the interview,they admitted that their cloze test performance would be promoted by the help of reading strategies.From the results of previous studies and the present study we can reach the conclusion that teachers can enhance students' cloze test performance and reading ability through systematically cultivating students'awareness of employing reading strategies.Meanwhile,it is important that helping students consolidate basic language knowledge,strengthen their language proficiency and develop good learning habits.