Lesson Eleven

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Lesson Eleven

• Cloze

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Contents

• What is cloze procedure?
• A cloze passage
• Two kinds of cloze
• Four types of deletion
• Examples of types of blank
• How to score a cloze test
• How to make a fixed-ratio cloze test?
• Difficulty level of cloze
• Uses of cloze
• C-tests

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What is cloze procedure?

• Definition
• the practice of measuring language proficiency
  or language comprehension by requiring examinees
  to restore words that have been removed from
  otherwise normal text. (Jonz 1990)
• a technique for measuring reading comprehension.
  In a cloze test, words are removed from a
  reading passage at regular intervals, leaving
  blanks. For example, every fifth word may be
  removed. The reader must then read the passage
  and try to guess the missing words. (Richards,
  Platt, and Weber, 1985, Longman Dictionary of
  Applied Linguistics.)

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A Cloze Passage

• A passage used in cloze test is a of
  written material in words have been
  regularly . The subjects must then to
  reconstruct the passage filling in the
  missing .

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Two kinds of cloze

• Based on how the blanks are created generally,
  there are two kinds of cloze fixed-ratio and
  rational deletion.
• Fixed-ratio (nth word deletion)
• Delete every nth word, no matter what word it is.
  (n511 in normal practice)
• Rational deletion (selective deletion)
• The words are deleted on the basis of some
  rational decision.

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Four types of blank (or deletion)

• Based on the amount of info. needed to fill in
  the blank, there are four types of deletion.
  (Bachman 1985)
• Type 1 deletion within clause.
• Type 2 deletion across clause(s), within
  sentence.
• Type 3 deletion across sentences, within text.
• Type 4 deletion extra-textual ( based on
  prior/background knowledge)

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A note to type four deletion

• Note
• Recognized set phrase for which there is only one
  possibility to fill the blank (and you cannot
  rely on your syntactic knowledge or follow any
  rules)? Type 4 deletion.
• Examples
• interested in be interested
  addition to opportunities practice

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Examples of types of deletion

• Their primary purpose is usually ___ give
  religious instruction to children.
• Joe is a freshman, and he ___ having all the
  problems that most ___ have. As a matter of
  fact, his ___ started before he even left home.
• ___ general, people like her.
• The bachelors degree can ___ followed by
  professional studies, ___ lead to degrees in ___
  professions as law and ___, and graduate studies,
  which ___ to masters and doctoral ___.

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Two scoring methods

• Exact word method
• The test taker scores if and only if the answer
  is exactly the same as the original word of the
  text.
• Acceptable (or appropriate) word method (or
  acceptable alternative or contextually
  appropriate method)
• Any responses that match the criteria below
• Grammatically correct
• Make good sense in the context

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How to make a fixed-ratio cloze?

• Selection of the passage
• topics, rhetorical modes, level of difficulty,
  length (50 deletions one sentence in the
  beginning and end has to be left intact).
• Test different values of n
• to make sure that four types of deletion are all
  included (if for general reading comprehension).
• Decide on the scoring method.
• Prepare the answer key.
• get professional native speakers responses for
  acceptable word method.

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Difficulty Level of Cloze

• For native speakers (Bailey 61 -62)
• Using the exact word method
• Independent level of reading gt 53
• Instructional level 44 53
• Frustrational level lt 44
• Other factors
• Length and complexity topic, genre
• vocabulary, syntactic structures
• Amount of time allowed
• Frequency with which blanks are spaced

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Uses/Advantages of cloze

• For assessment
• No special training required easy to conduct
• In large-scale testing, use multiple-choice
  format
• Measure reading overall language proficiency
• For teaching
• Proficient readers can switch between different
  levels of processing, whereas poor readers lower
  level of clause/sentence level syntactic
  processing or stick to one level.
• Ss can improve reading ability if guided through
  the 4 levels of text processing.

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C-tests

• starting with the second sentence of the text,
  the second half of every second word is deleted.
  (cited in Bailey 63, 1998)
• In words having an odd number of letters, there
  are more blanks given than letters.
• Example tho_ _ _ _ (for thought)
• Now, do the exercise on p. 63 (Bailey).