| Every reform in English teaching will indispensably give rise to corresponding changes in language testing. Cloze, designed to test students’ integrative English ability, has been applied in different level of English exams, while researchers both home and abroad have argued about its validity for a long time. At present, researchers abroad show great intention in empirical study about validity by exploring the correlations between a cloze test and vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, writing and the process of solving problems, while researchers at home have much interest in using qualitative methods to analyze the relationship between different deletion, cloze kinds and cloze test, and to test whether the cloze can measure students’ integrative abilities. However,few people study the cloze validity of self-made exam papers in northwest area. Based on this, the paper is to study Shaanxi college entrance English cloze exam from 2008 to 2012 from the following three questions: 1) What are the characteristics of cloze from 2008 to 2012 in Shaanxi College Entrance English Exam in terms of content validity? To what extent can it match the requirements of New Curriculum Standard? 2) What is the point validity and construct validity of cloze from 2008 to2012 in Shaanxi College Entrance English Exam? 3) Can Shaanxi College Entrance English Cloze Exam measure the students’ integrative ability? If yes, to what extent? If not, what improvement should be done?This paper first analyzed the content validity of the cloze from 2008 to 2012 from characteristics of input, expected response and the requirements of New Curriculum Standard. Characteristics of input mainly include genre, topic, length, new information and readability. And then this paper compares the results of content validity with the requirements of New Curriculum Standard to find out whether the results reach the requirements. The result shows that the cloze from 2008 to 2012 has a relatively low content validity especially in monotonous genre, relatively low readability and limited topics in social science and humanities, which does not match the requirements of New Curriculum Standard.According to the point validity model put forward by Professor Li Xiaoju, this paper analyzed Shaanxi college entrance English cloze exam from 2008 to 2012 from test point level and focus factor by using text analysis and quantitative method. The result shows that the cloze from 2008 to 2012 has high point validity, which prefers to test sentence and context level instead of word level, i.e., it is to test the use of language knowledge in context.At last, with the 40 senior high school students at grade three in Jingbian No. three Middle School in Shaanxi province being subjects, this paper made a comparison of students’ thinking process and the performance to analyze the construct validity of the cloze from 2008 to 2012 by using questionnaire. The result shows that students in each level all prefer to skim the cloze passage to get the main idea. For students in 0-7, they do not show great interests in adopting strategies except strategy 9 out of the low English ability. For students in 8-12, with the growing English ability, they are likely to use vocabulary strategies and strategy 12 of sentence part to fill in the blanks. For students in 13-20, out of the high English level, they have great tendency to use various strategies in the four parts to deal with the answers. From what we have analyzed above, it shows that the cloze from 2008 to 2012 is inclined to test students’ ability in sentence and context level and can test the abilities of different level students in test performance, which means that it can test students’ comprehensive abilities.On the basis of the above, the writer summarized the limitations of this paper and proposed some suggestions such as avoiding subjectivity as much as possible when it comes to the classification of test point level, choosing more cloze tests, analyzing the construct validity of the cloze one by one and studying more different validities of cloze. |
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