A Study On The Factors That Influence Cloze Test Difficulty

Cloze tests, introduced by W. L. Taylor in 1953, were initially used as a means to assess the readability of texts in the reader's native language. Before long they came to be used in the second language testing, but didn't get popular until 1970s when unitary competence advocated by Oiler was gaining attention. The cloze test is considered to be a quick, economic method of measuring overall language proficiency as well as reading comprehension. However, there is a strange phenomenon about the cloze test in China that cloze tests are widely used in various kinds of tests while little attention is given to the study of the cloze test. Especially where cloze difficulty study is concerned, even fewer researchers have touched upon the issue. Since test difficulty has considerable influence on the reliability and validity of a test, it is necessary for us to explore what factors are to make impact on cloze difficulty, so that we can develop various types of cloze tests with difficulty manipulatable and further meet the various requirements of language teaching and testing in our daily life.This paper reports on the experiments carried out on the cloze procedure where the variables of text type, text topic, deletion type and response format are involved. Carefully designed cloze tests were administered to 98 middle school students in Shanghai Songjiang No. 2 Middle School. The scores for the cloze tests were computerized and the SPSS 11.5 was applied to process the data.After the statistic analyses and objective discussion, the researcher got the following conclusions:Text type has more effect on difficulty of the rational cloze than on the multiple-choice cloze;Text topic exerts some influence on the rational cloze, especially on the rational cloze with scientific information, but no effect is found on the multiple-choice cloze;Different deletion types load some impact on cloze difficulty. As regards intra-sentential, inter-sentential and extra-contextual items, intra-sentential items are the easiest while extra-contextual items are the most difficult; as for content word and function word, function word is more difficult in the multiple-choice cloze; where the items coexisting in one sentence (multi-item) and one item in one sentence (single-item) are concerned, the multi-item is more difficult in the rational cloze;Language proficiency also has some effect on cloze difficulty. There is a significant...