1. Introduction
A cloze test is usually a paragraph or more in length with certain words or part of words deleted. As a widely used testing device, its popularity can be witnessed in its appearance in the fields of language testing and teaching. A banked cloze test, being a new format of cloze test, has different features from other classical cloze tests. In a banked cloze test, ten words are deleted from a text and are grouped in a bank together with five distracters. Each word in the bank is identified by a letter. Testees are required to select the appropriate ones from the bank and put the corresponding letters into the blank.
In the year of 2006, the banked cloze test was employed as a new part of reading comprehension in the innovated College English Test 4 (CET-4), which is one of the most pervasive and authoritative standardized tests in China. However, since it was adopted it has been the one where students easily fail to get marks. Therefore it is of great necessity to investigate test-taking processes for banked cloze tests, which can help shed light on how the testees deal with the banked cloze items, and thus contribute to their performance improvement on this test form and give an implication for more appropriate ways to acquire vocabulary.
The banked cloze test involves the measurement of testees‟ reading comprehension ability and vocabulary knowledge in line with the embedded, comprehensive and context-dependent nature of words (Read 2000). However as the introduction of the banked cloze is accompanied by the removal of the Vocabulary and Structure part which is in context-independent multiple-choice format presenting words in isolation, it tends to give students a wrong impression that the former is a substitute for the latter, which may further lead to the consequence that students simply spend time unproductively memorizing long list of words together with synonyms or definitions as they used to do in preparation for the old test form. They tend to have highly developed memory strategies, but less developed comprehensive word knowledge for problem-solving. The investigation of the test-taking processes for banked cloze tests can help to reveal the way vocabulary is processed in this test format and thus give an indication of students‟ vocabulary acquisition strategies.
2
Students‟ adoption of different acquisition strategies may result in their variation in vocabulary acquisition, while vocabulary difficulties could lead to reading comprehension problems. Therefore it is of interest to explore whether the way students acquire vocabulary exerts influence on reading comprehension processes thus to facilitate or impede reading comprehension ability, and whether there is a correlation between reading processes and vocabulary acquisition strategies.
Greatly inspired by the research done by Gao and Gu (2008) which aims to investigate the test-taking processes for banked cloze tests, the present study continues the line of their research but takes a further step forward to explore the implications of students‟ test-taking process for their vocabulary acquisition. This research hopes to generate a shift of focus from decontextualized to more context-related vocabulary acquisition and improve students‟ performance in test situation and contribute to the enhanced comprehensive language ability.