An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Designing Factors On Senior Middle School Cloze Test Difficulty

Cloze test is widely accepted and used in most examinations because of its briefnessand easy design, especially in the Entrance College Examination, Post GraduateExamination. The examinees performance on this test can have an important effect ontheir final score. After researchers’ many years’ hard work, the types of cloze tend to bediverse, scientific and reasonable. From fixed ratio method to rational method, it isrelated to researchers’ strive to check the examinees’ practical English level withoutbeing disturbed by other factors.At present, the type of rational cloze is often employed in the English test practice,but the research sampling the senior middle school English learners is extremely short.Researcher Yu Weishei doing a large scale report, found about52.1%of the studentsthink cloze is tough for them to do and its validity and reliability is also questioned.Based on the fact, this research puts forward four factors which can possibly influencethe difficulty of cloze test. The presupposed factors are text type, the involved knowledgecategories and part of speech.The research takes130students from YanAnShiYan Middle School as the sample totest their cloze performance by doing three different short cloze text and gets their clozeperformance and their English language proficiency. And then analyzes the effect of thefour factors on the cloze difficulty based on related data with the SPSS17.0and Excelfrom the perspective of the analysis of correlation and One-Way ANOVA. The followingresults are gathered:Firstly, as far as text type is concerned, narrative cloze has an obvious effect oncloze difficulty. However, exposition and argumentation are not correlated with it. Secondly, the involved knowledge categories also affect the cloze difficulty. Indetail, vocabulary, collocation, and grammar are closely correlated with the students’overall language proficiency except cohesion. As to the scores the students get from theitems, we find collocation and grammar are too difficult for them. we find what clozecan effectively measure the students’ collocational competence.Thirdly, although the numbers of questions related to different part of speech arenot same, noun, adjective and verbs are easy for them, conjunction next, preposition andpronoun the most difficult. Obviously, function words are tough. Perhaps it is becausethe students ignore the context of the cloze text.Fourthly, Classical test theory demands the acceptable difficulty range from0.30to0.70, but the research finds that53%of the items can satisfy the demand.33%of theitems are too difficult while20%of them are too easy, so the checked items needrevising. We can guess the reason why the students are not satisfied with cloze test.