Research On The Internal Validity Of The Cloze Test

In order to further verify the quality of cloze test of NMET (National Matriculation English Test) in Shandong province, this study takes 10 years'cloze tests of Shandong province as subjects, employing statistical analysis, questionnaire survey as well as empirical study to explore its internal validity. It mainly contains content validity and construct validity; and this thesis also employs the feature validity of cloze test---testing point validity. The three kinds of validity will directly influence the internal validity of cloze test. Based on the validity analysis, this thesis also puts forward some feasible suggestions for English teaching. This study mainly answers two questions as follows:1) to what extent the cloze test of NMET (Shandong) test students'ability of reading comprehension as well as the comprehensive competence of applying English? Are there differences of using variable levels of information between high group, medium group and low group? If there are, what are the differences? 2) How does the testing point validity and content validity of cloze tests in Shandong province change during the 10 years? How is the overall internal validity? What is the enlightenment on high school English teaching?Firstly, this study analyzes the testing point validity of 10 years'cloze tests on NMET (Shandong) based on Li Xiaoju's testing point analysis diagram, which reveals that the testing points of meaning are more than others and the testing point validity is higher. Secondly, on the basis of Senior English New Curriculum Standard, the study performs a text analysis of the 10 years' cloze tests, and the result shows that its content validity is better and construct validity is more reasonable with daily life related themes, wider items, larger vocabulary, longer sentences, improving the difficulty of reading comprehension.Based on the text analysis, randomly sampling 58 students of grade three from Weifang Experimental Middle School of Shandong province as subjects and taking the English test of NMET (Shandong) in 2014 and that of NMET in 2015 as testing content, this study has been carried out twice. Apart from the cloze test, the study also adopts grammar and reading comprehension. All the data collected and analyzed by SPSS22.0. The result of the two tests manifests that the correlation coefficient between cloze test and reading is higher than that between grammar and cloze test of the paper in 2014; while the coefficient between cloze test and grammar test is greater than that between cloze test and reading comprehension test in 2015, which indicates the cloze tests focus on the students'reading competence rather than grammar learning. What's more, the correlation coefficient between reading and cloze test of high group is higher than that of other groups, which manifests the competence of using English of high group is higher.According to the text and the analysis of the empirical study, the study indicates the internal validity of cloze test is higher and some suggestions for future high school English teaching are proposed:1) grammar and vocabulary teaching should refer to concrete contexts, aiming at improving students'ability of applying English in daily life and learning; 2) teachers should pay more attention to discourse teaching, guiding students to reasonably apply different reading skills, such as skimming, scanning and fast reading;...