The present study investigates the testees' test-taking process for banked cloze, focusing on the following two aspects: the information sources and strategies. Employing simultaneous introspection and immediate retrospection, the study is conducted among 18 non-English major students. After examining their test-taking processes, a framework for analyzing testees' test-taking processes for banked cloze test is put forward. And then the researcher applies this framework to analyze the testees' protocols. Results show that regarding information sources, clause-level information accounts for the largest proportion, followed by text-level information, sentence-level information and extra-textual information, and in terms of strategies, the testees show a clear preference for bottom-up processing strategies, followed by top-down processing strategies and test-wise processing strategies. The verbal protocols have further revealed that the proficient readers seem to have a context-based reading model and they prefer to grasp the gist of the text, whereas the less proficient readers often employ word-based approaches and they are apt to identify parts of the text.
