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 & Field, 1997). Content schema is the background knowledge, which is relevant to the content domain of a text (Carrel & 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.