A Validity Study On Multiple-Choice Cloze And Open Cloze

The cloze test is a very popular means of measuring testees' language competence in many large-scale tests. The term "cloze test" was invented by W. L. Taylor (1953) to measure the readability of passages for native speakers. It was originally constructed by deleting words from a selected material and the examinees were required to fill in the blanks. "Cloze" refers to the human's natural psychological tendency to fill in gaps in patterns according to Gestalt psychology in Germany. Furthermore, nature language has redundancy information, if some words in written language are missing, readers still can understand the main idea of the whole passage, even restore those missing words by using contextual clues.In general, cloze test can be classified into multiple-choice cloze (MC cloze) and open cloze (OC). In the MC cloze, testees are offered some words for each blank and required to make a choice among those provided choices. On the contrary, no choice words are given in the open cloze and testees have to fill in each blank by themselves. MC cloze is one of the most popular testing formats and still widely used in our country, but some English teachers, even test designers know little about cloze theory, even its testing scope, so during cloze test, there still exists much blindness. For example, MC cloze sometimes is used to test only vocabulary and grammar knowledge. Compared with MC cloze, since all the choices are eliminated in the open cloze, testees find it hard to get higher scores. On the other hand, deep researches on cloze test in our country are still scare, so this thesis has its necessity and practical significance.The overall purpose of the current study is to investigate whether there exist any differences in validities between multiple-choice cloze and open cloze test. To that end, the following research questions are examined:1. Are there any variations on validity constructed by multiple-choice cloze and open cloze exerted from the same material? And what about its changes in difficultylevel and discrimination?2. Does a cloze test with open cloze yield a better test of testees' language competence than multiple-choice cloze does?3. What kind of attitude do Chinese learners of English hold toward cloze tests? For the purpose of investigating the above questions, cloze tests andquestionnaires were given to 296 subjects from Southwest Jiaotong University. Then the author analyzed the experiment and questionnaire results. It shows that, generally speaking, cloze test is a valid testing format. Compared with multiple-choice cloze, open cloze is more valid and can provide a clearer picture of testees' true English proficiency. While within MC cloze, banked MC cloze is more closely related with open cloze, separate item MC cloze measures only lower language ability as it correlates more with vocabulary and grammar knowledge. For these findings, the author further points out the recommendations to cloze test designing and ESL teaching.This thesis is hopeful of having some practical value, helping English teachers gain more understanding towards cloze tests and improve teaching effect in class.