Abstract:
Cloze tests have been widely used for measuring readingcomprehension, readability and language proficiency. There is still muchcontroversy on what it really is that cloze measures. The result of muchcorrelational research is contradictory and very unsatisfactory. Thus,with a qualitative orientation, this study attempts to look at thejudgmental validity of cloze as a test of reading comprehension. To thisend, a group of 32 native and non-native speakers of English sat astandard cloze test. The participants were expected to complete most ofthe blanks correctly if cloze measured reading comprehension properly,because the text had been intended for undergraduates while cloze-takers were all either PhD students or members of academic staff with aPhD. Surprisingly, the results indicated that none of the participantsreached the minimum native speaker performance criterion of 70%.Invited to reflect on what they thought they were doing when reading theblanked text, most cloze-takers felt that the text they read was a puzzleor a guessing game. Provided with the deleted words and asked to re-read the text, they confessed that cloze reading was very different fromthe second reading. Further findings and implications for future researchare discussed in the paper.
Machine summary:
"Gooskens and van Bezooijen (2006), Bertram (2006), Daztjerdi and Talebinezhad (2006), Zulu (2005), Spear-Swerling (2004), Hagtvet (2003) and Zervakis and Rubin (2002) are among the most recent studies experimenting with cloze tests for measuring comprehension or favouring them for such a purpose.
In other words, in the majority of the cases in which cloze tests have been considered valid measures of reading comprehension (or other language abilities), such conclusions have been arrived at as a result of correlating cloze results with those of the criterion measures (the validity of which may well have been under question).
5 focusing on blanks prevents the reader from grasping the overall meaning Discussion Considering the fact that all the candidates in the study were reasonably expected to have been more proficient in reading comprehension than or at least as proficient as undergraduates (for whom the original cloze text had been intended), and the fact that the chosen passage was from a qualitative research methods book with the topic of which all the candidates were quite familiar, it is highly likely that all the readers would comprehend the original text without difficulty.
The second explanation that cloze scores are not valid indicators of reading ability gains strength here especially because the qualitative findings in the interview phase indicated that none of participants felt that such a tool was appropriate for measuring their text comprehension.
Our findings here that standard cloze procedure is not an appropriate tool for measuring text comprehension runs counter to most other studies of cloze where cloze has been found or argued to be a valid test of reading comprehension."