The Syntactic Analytic Survey of Paragraph Completion in English test for 12th Grade Students

Abstract

12^th grade students in Thailand must attend the English test to apply for the University. Paragraph completion or cloze test part is found in writing part in English test, which focuses on grammar usage and its meaning. 150 questions from paragraph completion or cloze test in English test for 12^th grade students from Academic year 2012-2021 were analyzed to see the frequency of sentence structure and sentence meaning found in cloze test part. This study aims to identify each uncompleted sentence found in paragraph completion in English test. The study found that the frequency of sentence structure in the first four years of English test is much higher than sentence meaning. In contrast, the frequency of sentence structure and sentence meaning in the last 6 years (Academic year 2016-2021) are not different as the previous years. Grammar usage is the most important issue the students need to concern. To conclude, they need to have explicit knowledge in both sentence structure and the meaning of the alternative to determine the most appropriate choice to fulfill the given sentence in cloze test.