The Comparative Study Of Open Cloze And Separate Item Multiple-choice Cloze

Cloze test has been widely used at home and abroad since it was created by Taylor. Especially, the type of separate item multiple-choice cloze is employed widely. From the point of Gestalt psychology, filling in blanks in cloze is a natural psychological tendency. Furthermore, redundancy information and unitary competence hypothesis prove that the cloze test can examine test takers’ integrative ability by filling in the blanks from the contextual information.Many studies on cloze tests have been done both at home and abroad. However, the comparative studies of different cloze types are not comprehensive and in-depth enough. The author selects open cloze and separate item multiple-choice cloze that are widely used in teaching and compare them from different angles to explore which is more effective to measure and improve test takers’ comprehensive language competence.This study aimed at the following three questions:1. Do the students hold different attitudes toward open cloze and separate item multiple-choice cloze?2. Are there any differences in difficulty and discriminability between open cloze and separate item multiple-choice cloze?3. Are there any differences in improving students’ comprehensive language competence between open cloze and separate item multiple-choice cloze?The participants of the experiment were 90 students from two classes in Grade Two of Jinyang Senior High School in Jinzhou, and one was the experiment class and the other was the control class. In this research, they were required to finish the pre-test, post-test, questionnaire and interview, and take the cloze test which consisted of separate item multiple-choice cloze and open cloze. What’s more, the students in control class were trained with separate item multiple-choice cloze for 18 weeks, while the students in experiment class received the training of open cloze. After the training, the students in the two classes received the post-test simultaneously. Finally, all the data collected from tests and questionnaire was analyzed by SPSS 11.5. Meanwhile, the interview was for qualitative analysis.The research has demonstrated that: first, the students hold more positive attitude toward separate item cloze than open cloze. Second, the difficulty and discriminability of open cloze were higher than those of separate item multiple-choice cloze. Third, open cloze was more effective in improving students’ comprehensive language competence than separate item multiple-choice cloze.Therefore, it is important for English teachers to pay attention to students’ attitudes towards learning and testing. In addition, it is necessary to construct tests with appropriate difficulty. Finally, teachers can frequently use open cloze to some extent in their English teaching and training to improve their students’ comprehensive language competence. It is hoped that this research can awaken both senior high school teachers and students to the importance of open cloze.