[etni] Cloze
- From: Ellen Schur <ellens@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 16:52:04 +0200
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The question was raised the other day as to why the cloze was no longer
included on the bagrut exams. I haven't a clue as to the thinking of those
who put together these exams -- and I think that this is in and of itself a
problem, which I won't go into here.
However, cloze passages as a testing procedure are 'out' these days simply
because it's been seriously questioned what they actually measure.
If you delete every nth word from a passage, that means that some of your
deletions will be function words, i.e., determiners, prepositions, etc.
Others will be content words with a fixed form (nouns, adjectives, and
adverbs); still others will be verbs which would then need to be conjugated
and/or put in the correct tense. On a limited item test, this variation
raises the question of what you are testing: grammar? Spelling?
collocational knowledge? the student's ability to retrieve and produce a
particular word in its correct form? And we could all point to additional
linguistic elements as well that get included in the cloze soup. In testing
terms the question is, does this type of test which does not adequately
separate out the types of elements it contains, have construct validy?
That being said, a summary cloze of a reading passage with selected content
words deleted and given in alphabetical order as a word bank can serve as an
excellent review of the vocabulary of a particular text. The student needs
to review the vocabulary words and determine the most suitable context for
that item. And in this type of exercise you're going for one specific type
of knowledge.
Ellen Schur
The Open University
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