Validity Study Of The Cloze Items In Huaxia College's 2011 Final Exam

The cloze test came into being in the 1950s, invented by Wilson Taylor as one testing method of measuring the "readability", or difficulty of a text. From then on, it has been widely applied in foreign language tests. The theoretical basis of the cloze test is Gestalt Psychology. The type of test has also made use of redundant information in natural languages. Since the test was introduced into China, a great many empirical studies on the validity of the cloze test have been conducted. In 1998, the "Validity Study on TEM" carried out by TEM Testing Centers and England Culture Committee revealed that cloze test had a high correlation coefficient with the content of other subtests. Also in the same year, "Validity Study of the National College English Test" conducted by the National CET Center and England Culture Committee put forward that if the passage was well chosen and test items were well designed, cloze test could test the global language proficiency of the testees effectively. What's more, in 2005 Nie Jianzhong and Zhao Xiuhong discussed the validity of the testing points for the cloze part in National Matriculation of English Tests (NMET). However, reviewing the last 30 years'development of cloze test in China, the writer finds that researchers concerned with the validity of cloze tests in independent colleges'English tests from the angle of interpreting test scores and its backwash effect on teaching are comparatively lacking. Due to this, the paper studies the validity of the cloze items in Huaxia College's 2011 Final Exam in the light of the validation framework proposed by Weir C.J.In order to verify the validity of the cloze items in Huaxia College's 2011 Final Exam, the study mainly adopts two methods:observation assessment and data statistics analysis. Evidence is provided from four perspectives. The first one is content validity. With reference to the content stipulation of the cloze items in testing syllabus, the content relevance and content coverage are testified. Then the context validity is evaluated by observation assessment, including task setting, task demands and test administration. The third one is scoring validity. The reliability coefficient, marker reliability and the statistic attributes involving item difficulty and discriminability are considered. Finally, consequential validity, namely the impact on both students and teachers, is taken into accounts as well.The research results show that the content and context validities of the cloze test in Huaxia College's 2011 Final Exam have achieved a certain level. However, the reliability coefficient is not so high. The discriminability and difficulty index of some items are not satisfactory, which contribute negatively to the scoring validity. The investigation of consequential validity reveals that the impact on students and teachers is both positive and negative. On the basis of the results, it is recommended that measures should be taken to improve each facet of the validity of the cloze test. With regard to implications on teaching, several tentative suggestions are provided, including teaching words in context, enhancing intersentential comprehension and cultivating discourse awareness.