Introduction Cloze tests are prose passages, usually a paragraph or more in length, from which certain words have been deleted. In such tests, testees are required to supply the missing words, using “linguistic knowledge, textual knowledge and knowledge of the world” (Cohen 1980:97). This paper aims at a brief comparison between the standard cloze test and one of its alternate forms, the multiple-choice cloze test. The first part is intended for an introduction of the birth and development of cloze as a relatively new type of testing. The remaining part, the main body of this paper, is centered on a comparison between the two alternative forms mentioned above, revealing their own advantages and disadvantages respectively. This paper is mainly based on library sources, supplemented by my own experiment data. 1.Background 1.1 Theoretic Background of Cloze Tests Initially, the cloze tests, which were introduced by Taylor (1953), were used only to assess the readability of texts in the reader’s native language. It originates from Gestalt psychology, which holds that integrity of human consciousness is the most intrinsic feature of psychology. Therefore, it is a sub-consciously-motivated tendency to fill up the empty when one is observing an object or picture. After Taylor, the cloze tests came to be used in L2 testing, but it did not get popular until 1970s when overall competence was gaining attention. The idea of overall competence can be traced back to the Unitary Competence hypothesis proposed by Oller (1979); Before that time tests were devised to measure performance or recognition of separate sounds, specific grammatical features, or vocabulary items. What Oller said, in brief, was that language proficiency is indivisible, that tests only differ in their effectiveness at measuring this one factor, and that the elaborate apparatus of dimensions and tests used by the psychometrists could be replaced by one test which would directly tap the single indivisible faculty of overall proficiency, one of the most well-known being cloze tests, in which every nth word has been deleted. Among the deleted words, lexical ones take up 65 percent to 75 percent and functional ones, 25 percent to 35 percent. 1.2 Forms of Cloze Tests According to Hughes (1989), “there was time when the cloze procedure seemed to be presented almost as a language testing panacea”, because it is integrative – that is, it requires students to process the components of language simultaneously, much like what happens when people communicate. An integrative method, it was also quite easy to prepare, administer and rather easy to score. However, proficiency tests such as the cloze do have some limitations. For one thing, they are not sensitive tests of short-term gains. A good achievement test could show big improvement on question tags studied over a two- to three-week period. But a proficiency test generally would not show much if any improvement. What’s more, controversy arises in scoring. There are two possible ways to score cloze tests. One is to give credit for only the exact word from the story, called the exact word method. Another is to allow full credit for equivalent words as well, namely, the acceptable word method. The first method is quite economical, but might discourage the productive skills of students. And, although the second one is generally considered to be more “fair”, it is difficult for teachers who are non-native E，英语论文范文，英语论文范文 |
