USE OF THE CLOZE TEST AS A COMPLEMENT TO STANDARD PLACEMENT MEASURES IN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE PROGRAMS

Cloze tests prepared both from general interest reading materials and from materials drawn from college texts were administered to 66 international students enrolled in reading classes at the English Language Institute at Texas A&M University. Each student took both an academic and a general cloze test with either every fifth word deleted or every tenth word deleted.;Findings with this sample support previous research studies which show the cloze to be significantly correlated with standardized language proficiency measures used for placement and with other integrative language measures as well. Deletion scheme was found to be an irrelevant factor when the difficulty of the material was beyond the student's comprehension level.;Practical implications address the issues of placement (the use of cloze as an alternative to or supplement to standardized proficiency measures); instruction (for diagnosis and remediation, for student self-diagnosis, for individualized instruction); and the use of cloze in other educational settings (adult literacy, adult basic education, staff development).;There were several purposes for this study: (1) to examine correlational relationships between the general cloze test and standard placement test scores; (2) to examine the correlational relationship between the academic cloze test and an oral proficiency examination; (3) to examine mean scores relative to the deletion scheme to determine whether deletion scheme is a critical factor in either the test construction process or in test score results.