An Empirical Study On The Internal Validity Of Cloze Test In Hunan Matriculation English Test From2008to2010

Based on Gestalt Psychology, Wilson Taylor invented cloze test to measure the difficultlevel of texts and students’ language proficiency in1953. Cloze test aims to measure the testtakers’ comprehensive English ability in the target language. Validity of cloze is always thehot spot for the researchers. HNMET attracted special attention on the design of cloze testsince it began to design English examination eight years ago. However, the scientific study oncloze test is relatively less, especially empirical study on validity of cloze.According to the principle of cloze procedure and the test objectives, the research usescloze tests of HNMET as sample to analyze content validity and construct validity, and thenproposes some useful suggestions. The study aims to answer two questions. One is whetherthe design of cloze test follows the principle of cloze procedure, and whether cloze tests arevalid in terms of content validity and construct validity. The other is which ability cloze testmeasures for reading ability or the ability of integrative use of English.Under the guidance of Bachman’s method of integrative language ability and EnglishCurriculum Standards, the study carries out a descriptive statistical analysis on three years’cloze test of2008,2009and2010. By analyzing three cloze tests on the basis of curriculumstandards, the result shows that content validity is relatively better than before, due to widertest items, larger number of vocabulary, longer sentences and more difficult in readingpassages. The analysis of difficult level and readability indicates that they are being in ideallevel. It reveals that difficult level of HNMET is appropriate and cloze test is valid, which canbetter reflect the function of selecting candidates.Sampling51students as the research subjects from the Senior Middle School, theempirical study has been carried out for three times. The materials consist of multiple-choice,cloze test and reading comprehension. The result of three tests are analyzed by SPSS, whichmanifests that the correlation coefficient between grammar and cloze test is higher thanbetween reading comprehension and cloze test. However, the correlation coefficient betweencloze test and reading is obviously higher in2009and in2010. The result indicates thatconstruct validity of cloze test grows higher and higher, and tests focus on the pragmaticability rather than grammar learning. The study proposes three suggestions on the improvement of language teaching. Itsuggests that grammar and vocabulary teaching should take into account of context. Teachersshould lay emphasis on teaching the learners by using words in context. Language teachingshould pay more attention on context teaching so as to make students understand the passagein the high-level. In addition, English teaching should improve basic learners’ languageknowledge and enhance to improve their pragmatic language ability.