Abstract:
Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous corrleational studies on cloze as a measure of either skill is at best unsatisfactory and indeed contradictory. The present study seeks to find an answer to the question of whether standard cloze (with different text difficulty levels) is a valid measure of EFL reading comprehension (with IELTS Reading Paper as the criterion). 76 junior and senior students majoring in English Language and Literature at Urmia University participated in the study, where they sat 3 versions of standard 5-th deletion rate cloze tests as well as the Reading Paper of an Institutional IELTS (UCLES, 1995, 1997). While the results are in accordance with most previous research findings that cloze is a valid measure of EFL reading comprehension, serious problems are identified and discussed on the appropriacy of such a validation technique as correlation
Machine summary:
"The present study seeks to find an answer to the question of whether standard cloze (with different text difficulty levels) is a valid measure of EFL reading comprehension (with IELTS Reading Paper as the criterion).
76 junior and senior students majoring in English Language and Literature at Urmia University participated in the study, where they sat 3 versions of standard 5-th deletion rate cloze tests as well as the Reading Paper of an Institutional IELTS (UCLES, 1995, 1997).
This study was accordingly an attempt to answer the following research question: Is there any statistically significant relationship between standard cloze test and the IELTS Reading Paper as a measure of EFL reading comprehension?
Table 2: Descriptive statistics for the tests (View the image of this page) Sections A, B, & D: cloze tests used; SD= Standard Deviation; Section C: The criterion test (Reading paper of the IELTS); TPS= Total Possible Score 3.
Statistically speaking, the easy cloze test is relatively highly correlated with the criterion test and the null-hypothesis is thus rejected, meaning that there is a significant relationship between easy ‘standard’ cloze test (scored by exact-word method) and the Reading Paper of the IELTS.
Both these coefficients suggest that the second related null-hypothesis be rejected too, meaning that there is a statistically significant relationship between the medium ‘standard’ cloze test and the Reading Paper of IELTS as a test of EFL reading comprehension.
The above findings provide the following answer to the main research question posed above: There is a statistically significant relationship between ‘standard’ cloze test and IELTS Reading Paper as a measure of EFL reading comprehension."