浅析图式理论在完形填空中的应用

论文总字数：37608字

摘 要

完形填空被认为是一种测试综合语言能力、阅读理解能力的快捷而经济的方式，在外语考试中有很多突出优点。本文探讨了将图式理论运用于完形填空解题的可行性，并以2013年普通高等学校招生全国统一考试（江苏卷）完型填空为例，探讨在此理论的指导下，教师帮助学生激活图式导入文章，整体感知建立新图式，把握重点综合运用图式，从而提高完形填空解题效率的教学模式。

关键词：图式理论；完形填空；应用

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Schema Theory 2

2.2 Studies on Cloze Test 4

3. The Feasibility of Applying Schema Theory to Cloze Test 5

3.1 Linguistic Schema——Providing Language Knowledge 5

3.2 Content Schema——Offering Background Knowledge 6

3.3 Formal Schema——Supplying Genre Knowledge 7

4. The Process of Applying Schema Theory to Cloze Test 8

4.1 Activating Schema before Doing Cloze Test 8

4.2 Building up New Schema while Doing Cloze Test 10

4.3 Consolidating Schema after Doing Cloze Test 12

5. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 15

Appendix 16

1. Introduction

Cloze test, created by Wilson Taylor, originates from 1950s (Taylor 1953). It is a language testing form which is based on Gestalt Psychology and focuses on the observation of comprehensive language competence. Later, it shows a lot of advantages when applied in second language acquisition. As a result, cloze test gradually becomes a common testing model in foreign language test.

Cloze test has been introduced into English test in China for more than 30 years and it enjoys great popularity. As a popular method in English test, cloze test aims to examine students’ basic linguistic knowledge, background knowledge as well as their grasp of organizational forms and structures of the written text, which is totally different from simple understanding of a word, a sentence or grammar rules. Such a feature makes cloze test the bottleneck for many English learners. Plenty of students have poor comprehensive language application ability. They lose many points in tests and complain that they cannot find coping strategies to score high. At the same time, most English teachers can hardly find effective teaching strategies when it comes to cloze test. They continue to use traditional word-translation method. Finally, cloze becomes a blind angle for both students and teachers. Therefore it is rather important to study available strategies for the teaching and learning of cloze test.

Schema Theory is a theory used to explain the psychological process of foreign language reading. Schema Theory reviews the rule that one’s existing knowledge structure influences his/her new knowledge structure, which affords theoretical foundation for people to learn a language and improve their ability to understand language. Schema knowledge is a crucial factor in students’ understanding, learning and remembering process. It helps students to understand the article, make predictions, regulate their attention, process significant information, search memories in an orderly way and improve their comprehensive language competence and reading comprehension ability. In order to finish a cloze test, one must build proper schema and fill in new information to make it concrete. The information students fill in is what they understand or speculate. With the build of linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema, students can overcome various obstacles they meet while finishing cloze test.

Cloze test counts a great part in English test in college entrance examination. It directly influences students’ total score. However, with various problems and inefficient strategies, students have low accurate rate in cloze test. Through making a comprehensive review of the dynamical and international studies of cloze test, the author found very few researches had been done in applying Schema Theory to cloze test.

This paper tries to explain that the application of Schema Theory to cloze test can help students to activate existing schema, replenish lacking schema and build up new schema. Moreover, it shows how to apply Schema Theory in cloze test with concrete examples. In this way, the research contributes to the full play of students’ initiative, helps to overcome the obstacles they come across while doing cloze test and arouse their interest in English learning.

The paper totally has five parts. The introduction part introduces the purpose and the background of the thesis. Part two introduces the definition and classification of Schema Theory. Moreover, this part illustrates the definition and relative research of cloze test. Part three discusses the feasibility of applying Schema Theory in cloze test. Part four introduces the model of applying Schema Theory in cloze test. The last part draws the conclusion that the appliance of Schema Theory provides advisable strategies for not only improving the teaching and learning level of cloze test but also enhancing students’ comprehensive language competence and reading comprehension ability.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Schema Theory

Schema was first put forward by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1781 (Kant, 1781). It originally means “product of transcendental imagination”, “transcendental time definitive property”. Schema combined intellectual conception and perceptual experience, acting as a medium between concept and subject.

Cognitive psychologist Barlett described “schema” as an active developing model, and thus he proposed the study of applying schema theory in reading psychology (Barlett, 1932). He thought that schema can be used in language understanding. Readers can use activated knowledge structure in memory to replenish unexpressed details. Barlett was the first person who leaded Schema Theory in the psychological area and applied it in reading (Barlett, 1932).

American Artificial Intelligence expert Rumelhart presented “Schema Theory Model”, making great contribution to the perfection of Schema Theory (Rumelhart, 1980). In 1977, he pointed out that while reading a text, the knowledge he has stored in mind always connected with symbols in the text, which counts a lot for comprehending relevant information. He also explained schema in the building blocks of cognition. There are various kinds of schemata in human minds, schema of eating, schema of going to school and schema of having dinner in a restaurant. All these schemata are composed of many units—knowledge, experience and background information in people’s minds. Rumelhart emphasized background knowledge (language, culture and text structure) while reading an article (Rumelhart, 1980). The more background knowledge one has about an article, the more easily he/she can understand it.

According to the Schema Theory, schema—the knowledge one has already learned plays an important role in the process of understanding cloze tests. That is to say in order to learn new things, one must connect new things with known conception and past experience. Schema is a kind of remember structure. Students need to reform the text of cloze tests on the basis of existing schema.

In the light of the Schema Theory, readers’ reading competence depends on linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. Linguistic schema refers to readers" existing language proficiency in vocabulary, idioms and grammar (Aebersold amp; Field, 1997). Content schema is the background knowledge, which is relevant to the content domain of a text (Carrel amp; Eisterhold, 1983:554). Formal schema refers to the prior knowledge about organizational forms and structures of the written text.

Since cloze is a passage with blanks, students’ problem solving ability will be affected by the above three schemata and vocabularies, sentences, grammar, theme as well as structure of the article.

2.2 Studies on Cloze Test

2.2.1 The Theoretical Basis of Cloze Test

Cloze is a comprehensive test item. Originated from 1950s, it was first used to judge the readability of an article, and gradually used to examine students’ reading comprehension ability and their comprehensive ability to use English. After decades of years, cloze test has become one of the important forms of English test.

Generally speaking, there are three basic theories that provide a solid foundation and development of cloze test: the Gestalt Psychology, the Redundancy Theory and the Predicting Grammar theory. The theoretical basis of cloze test is the principle of field in Gestalt Psychology. “Gestalt” is a Germany word, which means “cloze, total experience”. From Gestalt Psychology’s perspective, the essence of reading is to construct a cloze, which means that while reading a text, one have to use existing knowledge and the stimulus of context to have acquaintance with scenario relations ,thus they have achieve “gestalt” in mentality and cognition. That is the reason that language test includes cloze item—to test the knowledge level of the language learners. The redundancy theory believes that almost half contents in human language are redundant. The deletion of these contents does not affect understanding, while the addition of them can make understanding more easily and completely. The predicting grammar theory was put forward by Oller (Oller, 1979). It refers to language users’ comprehensive application competence of knowledge about sentence structure, semantics and discourse. When two people familiar with each other carrying out a conversation, they can always predict what the other one is going to talk about.

2.2.2 Studies on Cloze

Cloze test was put forward by Taylor in “cloze procedure”. It was first used to measure the readability of reading materials (Taylor, 1953:414). Thorough his research on cloze, Taylor concluded that cloze could test students’ reading competence (Taylor, 1953:415). Later, Oller (1979), Alderson (1980:59) and Brown (1989:46) enlarged the application area of cloze into second language learning. Since cloze is more reliable, more objective and more feasible than many traditional test items, it becomes popular in foreign language test.

In our country, cloze test was put into practice in 1978. It has been widely used in many fields. However, people pay seldom attention to it until a dozen years ago. Many experts have done their research on this item. They focus on ways of designing cloze test, the validity of cloze test and many other aspects. However, researches introducing cloze test and ways of filling in cloze test are comparatively few. As a result, the author tries to raise a kind of solution to relieve the problem of improving students’ ability to finish cloze test: applying Schema Theory to cloze test. Through the guidance of Schema Theory, the author sets forth that how a teacher activates students’ related background information, how to urge students to build up new schema, and how to eliminate students’ problem-solving obstacles.

3. The Feasibility of Applying Schema Theory to Cloze Test

Among all the English test items, cloze test is a new comprehensive language test item which has creative meanings and high requirements. As an effective method of testing students’ comprehensive foreign language ability, it has been widely adopted in English tests in our country. Nevertheless, it seems to be a vital problem for both students and teachers since it is difficult to find appropriate strategies to deal with cloze test. With all its characteristics, Schema Theory offers a novel approach to the teaching and learning of cloze test. According to Schema Theory, there are three different types of schemata: linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. And they prove to be feasible and useful when it comes to cloze test teaching and learning.

3.1 Linguistic Schema——Providing Language Knowledge

Linguistic schema refers to students’ linguistic knowledge——their knowledge about language, vocabulary and grammar, etc. Lacking of relative linguistic knowledge can be a great obstacle for students to finish a cloze test. If a student does not possess necessary words, does not master relative grammar or cannot clearly analyze sentence structure, he/she is not able to capture useful information for both understanding the passage and filling in blanks.

According to the Redundancy Theory, half language is redundant. The deletion of these contents does not affect understanding, while the addition of them can make understanding more easily and completely. Cloze formally is a short passage with vacancies, which seems to contain less redundant information. Usually, many information words have internal relations. Take the following two sentences for example:

1) I am leaving here now.

2) I am leaving.

The first sentence has redundant information. People use this characteristic to set blanks for cloze tests. Since cloze is a short passage in which message is somewhat damaged and the information one can process is of prime importance when he/she do cloze tests, whether the information is received well or not is not only related to the degree that it has been damaged, but also related to one’s language level.

From the above statements, it can be concluded that students’ language level——their linguistic schema directly affects their speed and efficiency of doing cloze tests. With adequate linguistic schema, students can obtain vital information, save problem-solving time and fill in blanks correctly. This makes it necessary that teachers and students pay enough attention to linguistic schema while dealing with cloze tests.

3.2 Content Schema——Offering Background Knowledge

Content schema mainly refers to the theme of an article. The familiarity one has for the theme and background of a cloze test counts a lot during the process of filling the blanks. If a student has little knowledge about the theme of a cloze test, they will have great difficulty in understanding the article itself. Apparently, we and people treating English as their mother tongue live in different cultural environment. In order to do a cloze test, students need to have certain knowledge about the target language. In this sense, English teaching can be seen as culture teaching. The introduction of cultural traditions, customs and values of English-speaking people must become an essential part when teachers teach cloze tests.

It is not difficult to imagine that the lack of background knowledge prevents students from making connections between language signs and what these signs actually refer to. Sometimes they might misunderstand the text and even chose wrong options. Look at the following example:

3) It ____ cats and dogs outside, I have to bring an umbrella with me.

In English, people will use “rain cats and dogs” to express a heavy rain. Students knowing this saying will choose “rains” without hesitation, while those having no idea of what the saying is might make a wrong choice. Besides, content schema helps students familiar with cloze tests and familiarity does influence speed and correctness of doing cloze tests. Look at the following example:

4) Government ____ the people, ____ the people, ____ the people.

This sentence comes from a lecture by American president Lincoin. He only used three simple words to exemplify the relationship between the government and the people. English learners and people familiar with the speech draft will quickly recognize this sentence—Government of the people, by the people, for the people. For them, familiarity influences the filling and restoration of damaged information.

The above two examples clearly show that content schema provides necessary cultural knowledge about English for students, so that they are able to build the relationship between language signs and what these signs refer to. The more students know about the theme and background of a cloze test, the more quickly and correctly heshe can finish the cloze test.

3.3 Formal Schema——Supplying Genre Knowledge

Formal schema refers to structural knowledge about all kinds of articles. Possessing corresponding formal schema, students are able to analyze structure of a cloze test, make judgments on logical relations among different paragraphs and at last have an overall recognition of the cloze test. On the contrary, if one lacks relevant formal schema, heshe will find it difficult to deal with a cloze test which has many paragraphs or large amount of vocabulary.

Usually, there are four kinds of articles: argumentation, exposition, description and narration. In college entrance examination, most cloze tests are taken from narrations. Things in these articles mainly happen in chronological sequence. Sometimes these articles are interspersed with flashbacks. Besides, some cloze tests come from argumentations. An argumentation is composed of three parts: thesis, argument and demonstration. Usually writers bring up their minds in the first paragraph. Then they use several paragraphs to support their idea. At last, they make conclusions in the final paragraph.

Formal schema helps students with their understanding of the genre of cloze tests. With relevant formal schema, they can have an overall view of a cloze test even if the cloze test is long and full of complicated contents.

4. The Process of Applying Schema Theory to Cloze Test

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