A Study On The Validity Of Cloze Format In Oral English Testing

Traditionally, the testing of oral English is by means of an oral English interview. But this testing method has several disadvantages as follows:1. To a big degree, the scoring of an oral English interview is not objective, but subjective. The personal preference and human factors of the interviewer can hardly be avoided.2. In a traditional oral English interview, the roles of interlocutor and assessor are combined. But it is hard for the interviewer to focus on communicating with the interviewee while at the same time evaluating his or her performance in an efficient way.3. The traditional oral English interview places the interviewee in a quite passive position. Under great pressure, the interviewee is very much likely to feel nervous in the testing situation. As a result, the interviewee's true ability in oral English may not be fully performed.In order to overcome the disadvantages of traditional oral English interview, cloze test is proposed to be applied to the testing of oral English in this research. Cloze test is viewed as a reliable and effective way of comprehensive testing. Highly reliable and valid, cloze test is widely applied in all kinds of language tests. Although the application of cloze format in testing oral English is seldom seen either at home or abroad, it is proven, in this paper, to be a satisfactory way of testing oral English.On the basis of the theory of communicative testing and by means of close test, the speaking ability is measured in this research. A cloze test from PETS-2 in March, 2009 was chosen and redesigned as a new test format of oral English. An experimental test paper was revised according to the outcomes of the experimental test. Then the final test was administered among 50 testees of the same English level. All the testers and testees were asked to do a questionnaire respectively as soon as the test was over and then all the questionnaires were collected and analyzed. All the scoring items in the test, comments and proposals from testers and testees were analyzed in detail. According to the statistics from the research, reliability, face validity, concurrent validity, interactiveness, practicality and backwash effect were proved.The result analyzed from this study shows that: applying cloze format to oral English testing minimizes the disadvantages of traditional oral interviews. The interviewees'true ability in English speaking can be performed to the full in a relaxed way without pressure or nervousness. Meanwhile, this new test format is proven to be simple, reliable and practical in testing speaking ability. It has good reliability, validity and practicality and it has positive backwash effect.The dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter One is introduction, which introduces the background, objectives and design of the study.Chapter Two is literature review. This chapter provides the theories and principles of communicative language ability, communicative language testing, It also states difficulties and present situation of testing oral English level.Chapter Three is research design. Research specifications, the whole research procedures and questionnaires are provided in this chapter.Chapter Four is the analysis of the statistics and questionnaires obtained from the research. A correlation between the statistics of Beijing Oral English Certificate (BOEC) and that of the new test format is proved. It also validates oral cloze test from reliability, face validity, concurrent validity, interactiveness, backwash effect and practicality.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It points out the significance of the study in testing oral English. It also shows the limitations of the study.