An Investigation Of The Rational Cloze Test As A Valid Measure Of Reading Comprehension Proficiency In L2 Learning

Cloze testing was firstly introduced by W. L. Taylor in 1953, who developed it as a reading test for native speakers. Few issues in the field of second language research have been as contentious as cloze testing since then. Until the proposal of the concept of integrative pragmatic testing by J. W. Oiler in 1979, cloze test was testified and accepted in language testing. The rational cloze test is one type of cloze tests. In the rational cloze, the tester chooses which item he or she wishes to delete from the text for the teaching or testing purposes. Many linguists at home and abroad have presented that the rational cloze test has the highest reliability and validity compared with other cloze forms and is a good way of checking students' overall capacity.The problem about reading has been one focus of language teaching, especially for the second language learners, for reading is the main channel of language input for them. There is a growing literature on the nature and processes of reading comprehension from cognitive and psychological angles and some linguists have studied the relationship between the fixed-ratio cloze test and the reading comprehension test. But very little has been done in the field of the relationship between other types of cloze tests and reading comprehension and even less has been done in the study of the rational cloze test. On the basis of previous studies, the present study attempts to discuss the connection of the rational cloze and reading comprehension with the quantitative and qualitative analyses.There are three purposes for this paper:The first purpose of the present study is to prove that rational cloze is really an effective integrative pragmatic test with higher validity and reliability.The second purpose is to search skills and abilities involved in taking the rational cloze and to investigate whether the rational cloze test correlates highly with reading comprehension test.The last one is to try to make some implications for second language teaching and testing.In response to the above three purposes, the study was carried out in three steps:First of all, The first test was designed on the basis of a CET-4 paper in January, 2005, which consists of five parts: grammar & structure, vocabulary, reading comprehension, MC cloze, and rational cloze. The part of rational cloze test was seen as an extended part of this paper. 54 students from one university in Shanxi province were selected for this study. All of them have passed the CET-4 in January, 2005 and the scope of their scores from 60 to 85, which is believed that they are representatives of the nation-wide students who have passed CET-4.