Cloze Procedure And Its Application In Oral Testing: An Exploratory Study

The testing of speaking is widely regarded as the most challenging of all language skills in preparation, administration and scoring. In many cases, a common method of testing oral performance is by means of oral interview. That is, the tester asks questions while the candidates answer them. And then scores are awarded to the candidates subjectively by the tester. This technique is simple and effective but it has many drawbacks. For one thing, in a conventional oral interview, the roles of interlocutor and assessor are combined. It is difficult for one person to concentrate on assessing effectively while at the same time trying to appear interested in what the learner is saying and involved in serious communication with him or her. Another disadvantage of traditional oral interview is that it puts the candidates in a quite passive position. The atmosphere of the test is usually tense and the testees are very likely to feel nervous. As a result, the testees may not be able to demonstrate their speaking ability fully. Besides the above-mentioned disadvantages, the scoring procedure of an oral interview is entirely subjective. Personal preference and human factors are inevitable. Hence, the reliability of the interview is questionable.To overcome the deficiencies of conventional oral interviews, the researcher is proposing a new oral testing technique that is familiar in communicative teaching but not in testing. For the sake of convenience, the new oral testing technique will be called"Oral Cloze Test"hereafter.Based on the principles of communicative testing and the theories of information gap in real communication, the present study tries to apply cloze test to the testing of speaking. Cloze test was invented by W. L. Taylor in 1953 to measure the readability of passages of prose. At present cloze test is widely used in all kinds of language tests and is proved to have high reliability and validity. But application of cloze in the testing of speaking is rare at home and abroad.The study tries to combine such skills as listening, reading, writing at the same time when the speaking ability is measured. In the present research a letter by a New Zealand teacher was chosen as the text. Based on the designing principles of cloze test, 20 gaps are created and the candidates are required to finish the oral test within 15 minutes. During the test, instead of answering the testers'questions, the candidates are encouraged to ask questions to elicit information from the testers so as to complete the gaps. Scores are awarded objectively on the basis of what the candidates have written down. This new oral testing format minimizes the drawbacks of traditional oral interviews. The candidates can demonstrate their speaking ability in a relaxed way without pressure and nervousness. Meanwhile the reliability and validity of oral testing is improved. The study attempts to achieve the following goals:1. To devise a new oral testing technique in line with the principles of communicative language testing and cloze test.2. To find out whether the new test has high validity, reliability, interactiveness, authenticity, practicality and positive washback effect.3. To find out whether the new oral test has ideal correlation with the students'performance on courses such as Comprehensive English, English Reading, English Listening and Oral English as well as with the national TEM-4.Taking some intermediate Chinese EFL learners as subjects, the study follows the following steps:1. A new oral test was devised on the basis of an authentic letter written by a New Zealand teacher in line with the principles of communicative language testing and cloze test.2. A pilot test was made among 20 intermediate Chinese EFL learners and then the test was revised according to the results of the pilot test.3. The revised test was administered among 50 EFL learners of the same English proficiency.4. A questionnaire was given to the candidates immediately after the test and all the questionnaires were collected and analyzed.5. Ten English teachers, who are the researcher's colleagues, were invited and trained as testers. After the test, the ten teachers were also asked to do a questionnaire and their comments and suggestions on the test were collected.6. The test was scored according to the marking scheme. After that all the items in the test were analyzed in detail.7. The test was validated from all aspects of communicative language testing such as reliability, validity, authenticity, practicality and washback effect etc. according to the statistical data collected from the study.8. To point out the limitations and future prospects of the study.The dissertation consists of nine parts. The Introduction part gives a brief introduction to the background and motivation of the research. It states the aims of the study and the rational behind the research. Chapter One is a review of the theoretical basis of communicative language testing. Hymes, Canale and Swain's language competence theories are introduced briefly, and then Bachman's framework of communicative language ability and test method facets are introduced. It also discusses the essential characteristics of communicative language testing. Chapter Two briefly reviews the theory of communicative oral testing. It discusses such questions as the nature of oral communication, the stylistic features of spoken language, the definition of speaking ability, types of oral tests, the difficulties in testing speaking ability and the present situation of oral testing at home and abroad. Chapter Three focuses on the information theory in linguistics, such as encoding and decoding of information,'Notion of Doubt'in real communication,'Density of Packing Information', information structure, given information and new information. This chapter also explores the relationship between information gap and cloze test. Chapter Four is a literature review of cloze test. Such things as the definition, classification and the psycholinguistic basis of cloze test are discussed. Chapter Five is a report about the empirical study the researcher has done. It is a description of the whole process of the research. Concrete steps of the research, such as the preparation, administration and scoring of the oral cloze test are described. Chapter Six is an analysis of the research data. Statistics of the test results as well as the two questionnaires are analyzed. Chapter Seven is a validation study of the oral cloze test. Based on the framework of the"Usefulness Theory"of evaluating a language test proposed by Bachman and Palmer (1996), this chapter validates the oral cloze test from different perspectives, namely, reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact and practicality. At the end of the dissertation is the conclusion part. A brief conclusion is made about the present study.Through the study, the following conclusions are reached:1. As an integrative test to measure learners'reading ability, cloze test can also be used to measure students'oral ability.2. The study shows that cloze test, if used as an oral testing technique, can reflect EFL learners'speaking ability to some extent, if not accurately.3. Oral cloze test is a simple, reliable and practical test format in testing speaking ability. It is proved to have good reliability, validity and practicality and it has positive washback effect on the teaching of oral English.