Abstract:
The current study tries to investigate the particular role familiarity with the genre
of the text plays in EFL learners’ performance on two types of tests, i.e. cloze test
and C-test. It also attempts to determine whether C-test is a measure of language
proficiency like cloze test. The participants of the study were fifty-one intermediate
undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan.
In two sessions, the participants took a battery of measures (a) two newly
developed cloze tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres, and (b) two newly developed C-tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres.
The results of data analysis revealed that familiarity with genre has a significant
impact on the performance of EFL learners on both cloze test and C-test. The
results further disclosed that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as
a measure of language proficiency, and C-test with the same genre.
Machine summary:
"Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), Vol. 14, No. 2, September 2011, 173-204 Cloze Test and C-test Revisited: The Effect of Genre Familiarity on Second Language Reading Test Performance Mansoor Tavakoli a Assistant professor, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Alireza Ahmadi b Assistant professor, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran Maryam Bahrani c MA student of TEFL, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Received 4 October 2010; revised 29 June 2011; accepted 10 July 2011 Abstract Keywords: One of the major issues in the field of language testing is to investigate the factors that affect performance on language tests.
Research on the construct validity of cloze test has focused on its ability to measure language proficiency (Chavez-Oller, Chihara, Weaver, & Oller, 1985; Jonz,1990), item difficulty (Abraham & Chapelle, 1992; Kobayashi, 2002), text topic (Alderson & Urquhart, 1985), and trait structure (Bachman, 1982).
g. Klein-Braley & Raatz, 1984; Kobayashi, 2002; Sasaki, 2000) concludes that language variety, content, degree of cohesion and scheme familiarity are the important variables that should be considered in selecting texts for any reduced redundancy test.
000 Cloze(political) Based on the results obtained in Table 9, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the performance of the subjects on cloze tests with familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres.
These findings suggest that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency (Bachman, 1982, 1985; Jonz, 1990), and C- test with both familiar and unfamiliar genres.
The results also indicated that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency and C-test with both familiar and unfamiliar genres."