The Effects of Passage Type, Deletion Type, and Scoring Method on The English Cloze Test Performance of Foreign Graduate Technical and Non-Technical Students
Chulasai, Dusadee
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/68867
Description
Title
The Effects of Passage Type, Deletion Type, and Scoring Method on The English Cloze Test Performance of Foreign Graduate Technical and Non-Technical Students
Author(s)
Chulasai, Dusadee
Issue Date
1983
Department of Study
Education
Discipline
Education
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Education, Reading
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of students' background knowledge, type of passage, cloze item type, and scoring method on the cloze test performance of foreign graduate technical and non-technical subjects for whom English was a second language. This was done by giving cloze test passages to 40 foreign graduate technical students in engineering and to another 40 graduate non-technical students in non-technical fields studying at an American university. Each student completed two cloze tests, one based on a non-technical general reading passage, the other based on a scientific technical reading passage. Either content or functor words were deleted and each test was scored using three different scoring criteria (exact word, synonym, and acceptable word scoring criteria).
The findings indicated (a) a general superiority of the technical students over the non-technical ones, particularly on the technical passages; (b) that the functor word deleted cloze tests were almost always significantly easier than the content word deleted tests; and (c) that scores were lowest using the exact word scoring criterion, higher using the synonym scoring criterion, and highest using the acceptable word scoring criterion. Also, interactions involving the factors of background knowledge, type of passage, cloze item type, and scoring method indicated that a cloze test using the exact word scoring criterion is likely to be most sensitive to students' background knowledge while cloze tests using the synonym or acceptable word scoring criteria are less sensitive to this and instead appear to be measures of more general aspects of English proficiency.
The implications of these findings for understanding the development of second language reading skills and for testing these skills using the cloze procedure are discussed.
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