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This study addresses the controversial question of which is more effective; teaching to the test, or teaching to communicate. It also highlights the viewpoints of some scholars about tests in different regions of the world; the Middle East and the West. The content of the research embedded in this article shows that there are a number of teachers who still believe in teaching to test following the traditional method, while some others think tests -especially in the elementary phase- cause anxiety, chaos and disappointment, and should be ruled out as a means of assessing students. In the Arab World, tests are still considered the main criterion by which students prove eligible to move to upper classes and get admitted to university programs. To provide the readers with a more concrete grasp of the discussed viewpoints, a questionnaire has been distributed among sixty-five male and female students taking English courses in the Foundation Program at Ibri College of Applied Sciences- the Sultanate of Oman. The results, implications, and applications will be discussed throughout this article while tackling the two major controversial issues: teaching to test or communicate.

Cloze-style reading comprehension in Chinese is still limited due to the lack of various corpora. In this paper we propose a large-scale Chinese cloze test dataset ChID, which studies the comprehension of idiom, a unique language phenomenon in Chinese. In this corpus, the idioms in a passage are replaced by blank symbols and the correct answer needs to be chosen from well-designed candidate idioms. We carefully study how the design of candidate idioms and the representation of idioms affect the performance of state-of-the-art models. Results show that the machine accuracy is substantially worse than that of human, indicating a large space for further research., Accepted to ACL 2019 (long paper)

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The competence in identifying and comprehending the meaning of idiomatic expressions developed at an early age. However, second language learners reach the comprehension skill differently within the age and at pace. There are many unresolved questions regarding the age which children start to comprehend L2 idioms. The objective of this study was to investigate the age at which children in Moi primary school in Nairobi were able to identify and comprehend the meaning of English idioms. The 60 participants were selected using purposive sampling. The children were divided into three age groups: 5-8 years old, 9-12 years old, and 13-16 years old. The participants were balanced in gender and level of formal education. They were asked to identify the correct non-literal meaning of the 20 idioms presented. It was reported that the group with an age range from 5-8 years old scored the lowest among the other.The findings showed that as early as five years of old (preschool age), children begin to understand some kinds of idiomatic expressions and that such ability slowly develops throughout childhood. At the age of 9, children mainly interpreted idioms literally. By the age of 12, they started to understand the non-literal meanings of idiomatic expressions correctly and continued to expand until the age of 16. It implied that age is a factor in the comprehension of idioms among children. Therefore, exposure to language input is vital in the process of early acquisition. The study provides pedagogical observation on early language acquisition. This study also assists the language teachers and language practitioners and material developers in decision making that lead to the development of a better curriculum.

The current study aimed to identify the level of readability of the sixth-grade Arabic language textbooks in the State of Kuwait from the viewpoint of Arabic language teachers, and in light of the students 'performance in reading the Cloze test of these books. For the current study, a tool was prepared that was applied to a sample of (200) male and female Arabic language teachers in the middle stage. The reading Close test was applied to a sample of (320) male and female sixth-grade students. The results of the study revealed that teachers' estimates of the level of readability of reading textbooks prescribed in the book entitled "My Arabic language" were of a moderate degree, with relative weight (57.8%). The results also showed that most of the students were distributed within the depressive level of readability, with a percent of (76.9%) and (16.6%) within the educational level, and (6.5%) within the independent level. It is also showed that there were statistically significant differences between the mean individuals of the sample of both sexes on the reading Cloze test in favor of females and that there were no differences based on the educational Zone. In light of the study results, a set of recommendations was presented. Received: 18 March 2021 / Accepted: 5 June 2021 / Published: 8 July 2021

This study discusses the general description of the textbook and then the description of the level of readability based on the readability formula and the reader's response. The method used is the descriptive method with a qualitative approach. The general description of the textbook based on the results of studies of the profile and anatomical structure is very good. Even though there is some lack in its anatomical structure, this is very reasonable considering the textbooks are presented as needed. The level of readability based on the Fog Index theory shows that textbooks are classified as very easy, while based on the reader's response through the Cloze Test the textbook is at the instructional level. This the researcher can judge that the book is suitable for use in learning. In practice the teacher's role is still needed in modifying the presentation of the material also requires the guidance of the teacher in the learning process.

This research aimed to describe the result of the non-English department students’ reading comprehension tested by using cloze test and the effect of using cloze test on non-English department students’ achievement on reading comprehension. This research is classified into pre-experimental research that used one group pre-test and post-test design. The population of this research is the non-English department students in the academic Year 2020/2021 with a total number of 107 students. The researcher used non-probability sampling type purposive sampling technique and there were 44 students taken as samples. The test is the instrument in this research. Data are taken from the result of pre-test and post-test then analyzed by using statistical technique. The analysis is used to find the significant difference in the students’ reading comprehension ability before and after the use of cloze test. In this research, the researcher used paired sample t-test through SPSS 17.0 to analyze the data. Based on data analysis, the mean score of the pre-test was 46.86 categorized as poor whereas the mean score of the post-test was 65.61 categorized as average to good. The mean score of the pre-test 46.86 smaller than 65.61 mean scores of the post-test. It meant that there was a difference mean score of students’ reading comprehension between the pre-test and post-test. This finding showed there was a different score before and after giving treatment. The result of paired samples t-test analysis showed the significance value Sig. (2-tailed) < alpha (0.000 < 0.05). Therefore, the alternative hypotheses which stated that there is an effect of using cloze test on improving non-English department students’ reading comprehension is accepted. It is concluded that there was an effect of cloze test on improving non-English department students’ reading comprehension.

The understanding of narrative stories by computer is an important task for their automatic generation. To date, high-performance neural-network technologies such as BERT have been applied to tasks such as the Story Cloze Test and Story Completion. In this study, we focus on the text segmentation of novels into paragraphs, which is an important writing technique for readers to deepen their understanding of the texts. This type of segmentation, which we call “paragraph boundary recognition”, can be considered to be a binary classification problem in terms of the presence or absence of a boundary, such as a paragraph between target sentences. However, in this case, the data imbalance becomes a bottleneck because the number of paragraphs is generally smaller than the number of sentences. To deal with this problem, we introduced several cost-sensitive loss functions, namely. focal loss, dice loss, and anchor loss, which were robust for imbalanced classification in BERT. In addition, introducing the threshold-moving technique into the model was effective in estimating paragraph boundaries. As a result of the experiment on three newly created datasets, BERT with dice loss and threshold moving obtained a higher F1 than the original BERT had using cross-entropy loss as its loss function (76% to 80%, 50% to 54%, 59% to 63%).

The study investigates systematicity in English interlanguage of dependent prepositions among L1 Thai learners of L2 English. It is hypothesized that Thai learners show non-random use of English dependent prepositions in their English interlanguage, and that the systematicity is largely attributable to cross-linguistic influence and certain cognitive factors. To test the hypothesis, 30 L1 Thai undergraduate students of L2 English at elementary, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels took two tests: a Thai–English translation test and a cloze test. The tests involved four types of relationship between English and Thai dependent prepositions: (1) [–prep] in English but [+prep] in Thai, (2) [+prep] in English but [–prep] in Thai, (3) [+prep1] in English but [+prep2] in Thai, and (4) [+prep] in English and [+prep] in Thai. The findings demonstrate that systematicity occurred in the learners’ English usage of prepositions of all such types, possibly due to negative transfer from the learners’ native language. Also, the L2 learners tended to exhibit such systematicity irrespective of their English proficiency level. It may be assumed that the cognitive aspect of L2 learners’ working memory is involved in processing the usage of the four types of English dependent prepositions. The results of the study are expected to shed light on the problems of L2 English interlanguage of dependent prepositions among L1 Thai learners.

Health literacy implies the knowledge, motivation, and competence of an individual to find, understand, evaluate and apply health information for the purpose of judging and making decisions about health. In the field of health literacy three levels of functionality are distinguished: functional (basic), interactive and critical health literacy. The assessment of the health literacy level is carried out by standardized instruments such as: REALM (Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine), WRAT (Wide Range Achievement Test), CLOZE test, TOFHLA (Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults) and NVS test (The Newest Vital Sign). The contemporary concept of health places health literacy in health resources as a factor that contributes to increasing health potential, and therefore quality of life as well. The importance of the appropriateness of therapeutic and informative communication in the daily work of health workers is reflected in the assessment of the level of health literacy of the users and the application of adequate methods and techniques of communication in the provision of health services, especially in dealing with vulnerable groups and groups at risk.

In teaching learning process a test is used to examine students’ knowledge of something to determine what they know or have learned. Testing measures the level of skill or knowledge that has been reached. Most teachers still used paper based test in giving a test and it is not interactive anymore now. This study will deal with one interactive test items using hot potato program. It is a software program that can give teachers alternative in creating test items. It consists of five test forms; J-Quiz, J-Match, J-Cross, J-Cloze, and J-Mix. J-Quiz consists of four basic question types: multiple choice questions, short answer questions, hybrid question and multi select questions. J-Match can give matching questions or ordering exercises. J-Cross can give question in the form of crossword exercises. This can be used for vocabulary test. J-Cloze can perform cloze test items. And the last, J-Mix can perform the mix between J-Quiz and J-Match. This program actually can be applied into four skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Hopefully, this paper only focuses on reading skill. By using hot potatoes in creating material for reading test, the students will feel enjoyable in doing the test. They will have a high spirit in learning English because it is a new challenge and experience for them.

This study investigated the relational reasoning capabilities of older adolescents and young adults when the focal assessment was a verbal and more schooled measure than 1 that was figural and more novel in its configuration. To achieve this end, the verbal test of relational reasoning (vTORR) was constructed to parallel the test of relational reasoning (TORR), which has been shown to be a psychometrically sound measure of the ability to discern analogical, anomalous, antinomous, and antithetical patterns within figural problem sets. Two-hundred undergraduate students completed the vTORR, TORR, and a vocabulary cloze test. The psychometric properties of the vTORR were first examined to ensure that data were reliable and valid. Then, the convergence between the vTORR and TORR was tested, along with the degree to which performance on the vTORR could be explained by linguistic ability, as measured by the vocabulary cloze test. Outcomes of correlational and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that there was a significant moderate association between the ability to reason relationally in word (i.e., vTORR) and in figure (i.e., TORR) and that linguistic ability contributed only a limited amount to performance on the vTORR. Of 3 theoretical models tested, a 4-factor model was found to best fit the vTORR data, indicating that the 4 specific forms of relational reasoning reflected in this measure were directly related to overall performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

In this article we show how readability depends on the number of terms. We compare two different physical-didactical texts. We explain what readability means and how readability of some didactical text can be checked. We will analyze texts of natural science. First, we use an eye tracker for measuring the time to read long terms average sized terms, and words that are not terms. We perform a cloze test. A comparison of results defined a variable of the readability formula of Slavonic physical texts.

The current study investigated the distinction of L2 (second language) English article choice sensitivity in fifty-three L1-Korean L2-English learners in semantic contexts. In the context of English as a foreign language, the participants were divided into two groups based on grammatical ability as determined by their performance on a cloze test. In addition, a forced-choice elicitation test and a writing production test were administered to assess, respectively, the participants' receptive and productive article choice abilities. Regardless of grammatical ability, the results disclosed the overuse of the indefinite a in the [[Formula: see text]definite, -specific] context and the definite the in the [-definite, [Formula: see text]specific] context on the forced-choice elicitation test. In the [[Formula: see text]definite, [Formula: see text]specific] and [-definite, -specific] contexts, however, the overuse of either the indefinite a or the definite the, respectively, was less likely. Furthermore, it was revealed on the writing test that the participants more accurately used the definite the than the indefinite a, and they were also found to unreasonably omit more articles than to add or substitute articles on the writing production test. The findings across the two tests indicate that L1-Korean L2-English learners are more likely to have intrinsic difficulties transferring their L1 noun phrase (NP) knowledge to L2 NP knowledge owing to structural discrepancies and complex interfaces between L1 NPs and L2 NPs with respect to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic/discourse language subsystems.

This study compares cognitive processing and cerebral activation during a cloze test to a multiple-choice reading test. Data were obtained through an innovative neuroimaging technique (near-infrared spectroscopy, NIRS) and stimulated recall interviews. Fifteen Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners participated. Greater brain activation was observed in the cloze condition than in the multiple-choice condition. Individual variation in degree of cerebral activation was also found and further examined by referencing the stimulated recall interviews. Pedagogical and research implications are provided, especially emphasizing that practitioners and researchers should exercise caution and informed judgment when they use cloze tests.

This study examined the occurrence of items from the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) in reading, listening and cloze texts in 12 versions of an English proficiency test used for admission purposes at Canadian universities. The relationship between the coverage of AWL in the texts and the corresponding scores of 6380 test takers was also analyzed. The results indicated that AWL coverage in the passages was consistently present and substantial although below the established level of coverage found in academic texts. Furthermore, AWL coverage had no correlation with the overall reading and listening comprehension scores, and there was a small, negative correlation with cloze test scores. The findings are discussed in light of lexical specifications of language proficiency tests used for university entry purposes.

In many reading comprehension tests, different test formats are employed. Two commonly used test formats to measure reading comprehension are sustained passages followed by some questions and cloze items. Individual differences in handling test format peculiarities could constitute a source of score variance. In this study, a bifactor Rasch model is applied to separate the cloze-specific variance in a reading comprehension test composed of sustained passages (plus questions) and a cloze passage. The results are compared with a unidimensional Rasch model where all items load on a single dimension. The inclusion of the cloze-specific dimension, that is, the method factor, improved the fit and resulted in substantially lower item difficulty estimates for the cloze items. Findings indicate that reading comprehension tests comprising sustained passages and cloze items are not unidimensional and contain a cloze-specific nuisance dimension that contaminates the latent construct variance.

We measured mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages in Europe. Intelligibility was determined for all 70 language combinations using the same uniform methodology (a cloze test). We analysed the results of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries. Lexical, phonological, orthographic, morphological and syntactic distances were computed as linguistic variables. We also quantified non-linguistic variables (e.g. exposure, attitudes towards the test languages). Using stepwise regression analysis the importance of linguistic and non-linguistic predictors for the mutual intelligibility in the 70 language pairs was assessed. Exposure to the test language was the most important variable, overriding all other variables. Then, limiting the analysis to the prediction of inherent intelligibility, we analysed the results for a subset of listeners with no or little previous exposure to the test language. Linguistic distances, especially lexical distance, now explain a substantial part of the variance.

Story understanding requires developing expectations of what events come next in text. Prior knowledge – both statistical and declarative – is essential in guiding such expectations. While existing semantic language models (SemLM) capture event co-occurrence information by modeling event sequences as semantic frames, entities, and other semantic units, this paper aims at augmenting them with causal knowledge (i.e., one event is likely to lead to another). Such knowledge is modeled at the frame and entity level, and can be obtained either statistically from text or stated declaratively. The proposed method, KnowSemLM, infuses this knowledge into a semantic LM by joint training and inference, and is shown to be effective on both the event cloze test and story/referent prediction tasks.

Competition is often incorporated into game-based learning. Accordingly, we developed an academic English competition cloze test (AECCG), in which there were two modes, i.e., real competition and virtual competition. On the other hand, the effectiveness of real competition and virtual competition is still uncertain. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies to address this issue. Study One examined the impacts of real competition while Study Two investigated students’ reactions to real competition and virtual competition. The results from Study One indicated that students made improvement between each task and between the post-test and the delayed test in the context of real competition. The results from Study Two showed that learners with virtual competition significantly had better learning performance and spent more time for undertaking the practical tasks than those with real competition. Furthermore, learners with real competition and those with virtual competition showed different learning behavior. Based on the results of these two studies, we proposed a framework, which can contribute the understandings of the impacts of real competition and virtual competition on game-based learning. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

In this study, the cloze-elide test was developed and administered under time constraints. This research is aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the speeded cloze-elide test and investigate its relationship with reading comprehension, C-Test, and multiple-choice cloze test. Processing speed is a vital indicator to distinguish high to low levels of language proficiency. The obtained test scores of the test takers' performance in the restricted time reveal their level of overall language proficiency. One-hundred fifty Iranian undergraduate English students were selected to participate in this study. A reading comprehension test, C-tests, multiple-choice cloze tests and speeded cloze-elide tests were presented to the students. The Cronbach's alpha reliability revealed that speeded cloze-elide test is highly reliable. Moreover, the principal component analysis resulted in the presence of one component which supports the unidimensionality of the data. The findings also illustrated that the C-Test is a slightly better measure of reading comprehension than multiple-choice cloze test and speeded cloze-elide test. Based on the analysis of data, time limitations increase the test validity and test reliability on the cloze-elide test.

Resumo O objetivo deste estudo foi explorar as diferenças qualitativas nos erros apresentados em um Teste de Cloze nas pontuações extremas de crianças e encontrar evidências de validade por processo de resposta. Participaram 277 alunos matriculados nos 3º, 4º e 5º anos do ensino fundamental público do Estado de São Paulo. Para a coleta de dados, que ocorreu de forma coletiva, foi empregado o teste de Cloze estruturado de forma tradicional, na qual se omitem todos os quintos vocábulos do texto e no local coloca-se um traço de tamanho proporcional ao da palavra omitida, bem como a correção verbatim. Os resultados evidenciaram evidências de validade baseadas no processo de resposta, indicando também divergências nas respostas entre os alunos que pontuaram menos e aqueles que obtiveram maiores pontuações. A discussão dos dados aponta para algumas implicações acerca dos processos cognitivos envolvidos na emissão das respostas das crianças. Abstract This study aims to explore the errors differences presented in a Cloze test of kids’ extreme punctuations and find evidences of the validity for answer process. 277 students from third, fourth and fifth grades of public education of São Paulo participated on the survey. For data collection, which occurred collectively, it was held a traditional Cloze test that substitutes the fifth words for a dash of the same size of the word hidden, as well as verbatim correction. Results showed evidences of validity based on answer process, indicating answer divergences between students with high punctuation and low punctuation. Data discussion points some implications about cognitive process involved on the emission of kids’ answers.

The presentation of extraneous (i.e., irrelevant or unnecessary) information may hamper learning with multimedia. The present study examined whether people can learn to ignore unnecessary information with increasing experience with the task and whether this depends on the layout of that information. In two experiments, participants learned about the process of mitosis from a multimedia slideshow, with each slide presenting a combination of expository text and a picture on one of the stages in the process. Slides either contained no unnecessary text (control condition) or unnecessary text (i.e., merely describing the picture) either integrated in the picture (integrated condition) or presented underneath the picture (separated condition). Knowledge about the studied mitosis phase was tested immediately after each slide using a cloze test. Across Experiments 1 and 2, we did not find a reliable negative effect of the unnecessary text on cloze test performance. As a result, the question of whether task experience would reduce or eliminate that negative effect could not be answered. The eye movement data did confirm, however, that participants attended less to the unnecessary information with increasing task experience, suggesting that students can adapt their study strategy and learn to ignore unnecessary information.

Submitted by Boris Flegr (boris@uerj.br) on 2021-01-07T15:21:15Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Cristina Pinheiro.pdf: 1906386 bytes, checksum: 4d847f7cd3be5cf3cca7ec8c109e60d7 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2021-01-07T15:21:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Cristina Pinheiro.pdf: 1906386 bytes, checksum: 4d847f7cd3be5cf3cca7ec8c109e60d7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-26 Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior The present work addresses the issue of reading and reading comprehension of seventh-year secondary school students. A longitudinal study was carried out, based on theoretical studies by Morais and Dehaene, as well as Kato, Solé and Marcuschi 's researches and arguments on reading and reading comprehension. The objective was to investigate the level of reading comprehension of written texts and to develop strategies that could contribute to the improvement of such understanding. Two Cloze tests were applied at two different times of the research. The study suggests a significant increase in reading comprehension of the students in the second test, applied after the intervention actions, indicating a positive impact of pedagogical actions directed to the development of reading and reading strategies. O presente trabalho aborda a questão da compreensão em leitura de alunos do sétimo ano do Ensino Fundamental. Foi feito um estudo longitudinal, tendo como base teórica os estudos de Morais e de Dehaene, além das pesquisas e considerações de Kato, Solé e Marcuschi sobre estratégias de leitura e compreensão em leitura. O objetivo foi investigar o nível de compreensão dos alunos em leitura de textos escritos e elaborar estratégias que pudessem contribuir para o aprimoramento dessa compreensão. Foram aplicados dois testes de Cloze, além de outros cinco testes durante a intervenção, em dois momentos diferentes da pesquisa. O estudo sugere um crescimento significativo em compreensão leitora dos alunos no segundo teste, aplicado após as ações de intervenção, apontando um impacto positivo de ações pedagógicas direcionadas ao desenvolvimento da leitura centradas em estratégias de leitura.

Natural language understanding is a challenging problem that covers a wide range of tasks. While previous methods generally train each task separately, we consider combining the cross-task features to enhance the task performance. In this paper, we incorporate the logic information with the help of the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task to the Story Cloze Test (SCT). Previous work on SCT considered various semantic information, such as sentiment and topic, but lack the logic information between sentences which is an essential element of stories. Thus we propose to extract the logic information during the course of the story to improve the understanding of the whole story. The logic information is modeled with the help of the NLI task. Experimental results prove the strength of the logic information., Comment: Student Abstract in AAAI-2019

This study investigated the elicited imitation task (EIT) as a tool for measuring linguistic proficiency in a second/foreign (L2) language, focusing on French. Nonnative French speakers (n = 94) and native French speakers (n = 6) completed an EIT that included 50 sentences varying in length and complexity. Three raters evaluated productions on five scales: meaning, syntax, morphology, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Participants also completed a cloze test and a language background questionnaire. Results from regression and principal component analyses showed a strong relationship between EIT performance and cloze test scores and significant relationships between EIT performance, sentence length, and learners’ knowledge of and experience with French. Ratings were internally consistent, and all test items discriminated well between lower- and higher-level learners. We argue that this EIT exhibits good validity and reliability, discriminates among French learners of different proficiencies, and is a practical tool for L2 proficiency assessment.

There is now clearer recognition that, in a country as culturally and linguistically diverse as Nigeria, specific attention must be paid to the mental readiness of learners especially in acquiring language different from their first language or lingua franca such as French language. Vocabulary acquisition is part of the psychology of foreign language learning that has received short shrift from applied linguistics, and has been very largely neglected by recent developments in research. This study therefore examined the impact of psychological well-being on the vocabulary acquisition level of Nigerian adolescents learning French language in rural settings. Survey research design was adopted in this study. Sixty eight students from fourteen secondary schools were randomly selected for this study with age range 15 to 18 years. They were made up of 38 males representing 52.9% and 30 females representing 47.1%. Out of this sample 42% were in SS1, 36% in SS2 and 22% in SS3. All these students had French language as one of subjects they were taking in school. These schools were located in rural areas in Ogun and Oyo states, Southwest Nigeria. A questionnaire was developed to measure students’ psychological well being while cloze test was used to measure vocabulary acquisition level. The two instruments yielded 0.78, and 0.76 test-retest reliability respectively with 0, 64 Cronbach Alpha for Psychological well being measure and 0.66 for cloze test. The findings revealed low level of performance in the five subscales of Psychological Well being Measure, self-acceptance, quality ties to other, autonomy in thought and action, the ability to manage complex environments to suit personal needs and values, the pursuit of meaningful goals and a sense of purpose in life and continued growth and development as a person. The study equally reported low level of vocabulary acquisition of French language across all the levels. A significant impact of psychological wellbeing on the vocabulary acquisition of French language was found at r=0.62, adj r2=0.59 and f(1,66)= 48.26, p

O estudo em foco tem como objetivo comparar a proficiência leitora de um grupo experimental composto por estudantes de português L2 da FLUP com a de um grupo normativo de falantes nativos de português. Partindo da utilização do teste Cloze, o estudo baseou-se na pesquisa acerca da leitura em L2 no nível avançado e na análise dos referenciais do QECRL para os mesmos níveis, tendo como objetivo a planificação de um conjunto de sete unidades letivas de duas horas centradas na leitura da crónica imprensa, por ser um texto de características literárias, complexas e híbridas. Os resultados do teste aplicado a ambos os grupos revelaram que o nível de proficiência leitora do grupo experimental se encontrava distante tanto do desempenho do grupo normativo no mesmo teste, como dos referenciais do QECRL para os níveis C1 e C2, facto que levou à pesquisa de estratégias metodológicas com vista ao desenvolvimento de atividades que permitissem aos estudantes aprofundar o seu nível de compreensão leitora. A segunda fase de aplicação do teste Cloze permitiu concluir que, com este grupo de sujeitos, as opções metodológicas implementadas nas aulas de leitura que mediaram as duas fases de testagem funcionaram a favor da superação de obstáculos ao processamento do texto. This study aimed at comparing the performance of an experimental group composed of advanced Portuguese L2 learners and a norm group of native speakers of Portuguese on a reading task. Using the Cloze test as a comparison instrument between both groups, the study was based on the analysis of existing L2 reading research literature and the references provided by the CEFR in order to design a set of seven two hour lessons focusing on deep reading press columns featuring literary, complex and hybrid characteristics. The results showed that the performance of the experimental group were distant not only from those of the norm group but also from the illustrative descriptors of the CEFR for C1 and C2 proficiency levels. Research on the field of language learning methods and strategies was necessary in order to design reading activities that would enable the students to deepen reading comprehension. The second phase of testing leads to the conclusion that, with this group of subjects, the methodological choices implemented throughout the reading lessons that were held between both testing moments led to an improvement in reading processing.

This study examined a timed cloze test for evaluating English proficiency in second language (L2) experimental research. Forty-five Korean college...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between use and perception of five Catalan variants of the variable subject co-referential with an antecedent.This will be done by examining the results of a cloze test and three perception surveys answered in 1997 by 26 respondents. Two different correct constructions were then presented as correct answers in the exercise, which were also evaluated in terms of to what extent the subjects used them and how they felt about their grammaticality and their stylistic distribution. Three more variants were also evaluated in the same surveys. The result is that there is general agreement on the stylistic distribution of three variants, ranging from colloquial to formal situations, regardless to what extent the five variants are used. This project was sponsored by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia/n(HUM2007-61916/FILO).

O presente estudo buscou evidência de validade para medidas que avaliam construtos relacionados, a saber, a compreensão de leitura e a consciência fonológica. Participaram da pesquisa 112 crianças de ambos os gêneros, com idade entre 6 e 12 anos (M = 8,46; DP = 1,68), matriculadas no 2° e no 5° anos do Ensino Fundamental de uma escola pública do interior de São Paulo. Os estudantes foram submetidos ao teste de Cloze, ao Roteiro de Avaliação da Consciência Fonológica e à Prova de Consciência Fonológica por Produção Oral, sendo os dois últimos aplicados individualmente. Os resultados obtidos confirmaram a existência de validade de critério por grupos contrastantes, uma vez que as crianças que obtiveram escores altos na Prova de Consciência Fonológica por Produção Oral também apresentaram desempenhos significativamente superiores no Cloze e no Roteiro de Avaliação da Consciência Fonológica. This study searched for evidence of validity for measures that evaluate related constructs, namely, reading comprehension and phonological awareness. A total of 112 second- and fifth-grade children of both sexes between the ages of 6 and 12 years (M = 8,46; SD = 1,68) from a public elementary school in a town in São Paulo participated in the study. The students answered a cloze test, the Phonological awareness assessment and Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production, the last two being administered individually. The results confirmed the existence of criterion validity in contrasting groups, as the children who obtained high scores on the Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production also showed significantly higher performance on the cloze test and the Phonological awareness assessment.

This study examined the extent to which 40 students enrolled in upper level foreign language literary/cultural studies content courses showed evidence of incidental language learning over the course of a semester. Students completed a cloze passage and provided both writing and speaking samples at the beginning and end of the semester. In addition, they completed questionnaires related to their goals and perceived development, and instructors were interviewed and observed at various intervals throughout the semester. Instructors' focus was primarily on the content; focus on language was secondary and dealt with incidentally. Some positive evidence of language learning was found, but was mostly limited to students' writing. Speaking abilities, on the other hand, showed little evidence of significant improvement, and global proficiency, as measured by the cloze test, improved in some cases but not in others. Thus, there is some evidence for incidental language learning, but the question remains whether more could have been accomplished. It is suggested that an approach that more intentionally integrates content and language may meet the needs of a greater number of learners and maximize the potential for more language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was carried out to find out the readability level of the reading texts in English Zone textbook by using Flesch Reading Ease Formula and Cloze Test at the tenth grade students of SMA N 2 Bandar. The population of this research was the tenth grade students of SMA N 2 Bandar in the academic year 2015/2016. The textbook consists of 181 pages with 29 reading texts in it. The researcher took 5 reading texts from the English textbook entitled English Zone published by Penerbit Erlangga and the tenth grade students of 30 students as the sample. The method used in this study was descriptive analysis using quantitative data. The instruments of the research were Flesch Reading Ease Formula and Cloze Test. The data were analyzed using Flesch Reading Ease Formula which is focused on the average number of the syllables per words. The result of the analysis by using Flesch Reading Ease Formula is grouped into three levels which are Very Easy, Easy, and Fairly Easy. The average readability score for all texts is 82.6 which implies that the text are in Fairly Easy Level. The result of the analysis by using Cloze Test, the average readability score of the five texts is 51.20% ( Independent Level ), the text are predicted to be of appropriate difficulty. It could be concluded that the reading texts were in the English Zone textbook were not suitable to be used by the students at the tenth grade students of SMA N 2 Bandar. Keywords : Readability, Textbook, Fesch Reading Ease Formula

This research was aimed to find out whether the English reading texts are appropriate or not in terms of the readability level for the tenth grade students of SMK Negeri 1 Binjai. This study focuses on the readability level of English reading texts for grade X students of SMK Negeri 1 Binjai majoring in Banking class in the academic year 2015/2016. This study is categorized as descriptive quantitative research. The data of the study was seven reading texts from an English textbook entitled Bahasa Inggris published by Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan in 2014 with various length and genres as the source of data tested to 30 students as the research sample. The instruments of the research were Flesch-Kincaid Grade level and Cloze Procedure Test. For the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula, the researcher counts the words, syllables, sentences, the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per words of the reading text to determine the level of readability of the English texts in students’ textbook. The cloze test was used to assess the difficulty in terms of a reader’s understanding and response to the structure of the language of a text. The results of the study show that based on the cloze test result, the researcher gets the average score of 7 reading texts is 57.39% and based on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula the average score is 6 so it can be concluded that reading texts of Bahasa Inggris published by Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan in 2014 are in the Independent level because the reading texts are readable and understandable to the tenth grade students of SMK Negeri 1 Binjai, and the texts are predicted to be quite easy. Therefore, the researcher takes a conclusion that this textbook is not appropriate to be used by the students at the tenth grade students of SMK Negeri 1 Binjai because they can read them by their own. Keywords : Readability, English Textbook, Students of SMK Negeri 1 Binjai.

The present study seeks to contribute to our knowledge of the effectiveness of reading in the incidental learning of collocations. The study also addresses the question whether out-of-class exposure such as watching TV, listening to radio or music, reading English books and using social media plays a significant role in the learning of collocations. The research participants were 46 Arabic-speaking young adult EFL learners. They were asked to read a modified text containing 10 pseudo-word collocations and to verify that all were unfamiliar to them. One week later, they read a text containing the actual 21 target collocations, which had been selected on the basis of appearing in instructional materials and a reference corpus, as well as of frequency. Participants were then asked to complete a meaning-recall cloze test in the form of a gap-filling task in which the 21 target collocations were embedded in sentences. Subsequently they were administered a self-report survey about any incidental exposure to English. The analysis of the quantitative results revealed that the target collocations can be learned incidentally through reading although the level of mastery was limited. The survey data showed a positive correlation between the learners’ knowledge of collocations and activities such as watching TV, listening to radio and reading English books. The study also confirmed that collocations are particularly difficult for adult EFL learners and is thus an aspect of vocabulary knowledge in need of further empirical investigations.

The Story Cloze Test (SCT) is a recent framework for evaluating story comprehension and script learning. There have been a variety of models tackling the SCT so far. Although the original goal behind the SCT was to require systems to perform deep language understanding and commonsense reasoning for successful narrative understanding, some recent models could perform significantly better than the initial baselines by leveraging human-authorship biases discovered in the SCT dataset. In order to shed some light on this issue, we have performed various data analysis and analyzed a variety of top performing models presented for this task. Given the statistics we have aggregated, we have designed a new crowdsourcing scheme that creates a new SCT dataset, which overcomes some of the biases. We benchmark a few models on the new dataset and show that the top-performing model on the original SCT dataset fails to keep up its performance. Our findings further signify the importance of benchmarking NLP systems on various evolving test sets.

In the Story Cloze Test, a system is presented with a 4-sentence prompt to a story, and must determine which one of two potential endings is the 'right' ending to the story. Previous work has shown that ignoring the training set and training a model on the validation set can achieve high accuracy on this task due to stylistic differences between the story endings in the training set and validation and test sets. Following this approach, we present a simpler fully-neural approach to the Story Cloze Test using skip-thought embeddings of the stories in a feed-forward network that achieves close to state-of-the-art performance on this task without any feature engineering. We also find that considering just the last sentence of the prompt instead of the whole prompt yields higher accuracy with our approach., Comment: 6 pages

We present a neural recommendation model for Chengyu, which is a special type of Chinese idiom. Given a query, which is a sentence with an empty slot where the Chengyu is taken out, our model will recommend the best Chengyu candidate that best fits the slot context. The main challenge lies in that the literal meaning of a Chengyu is usually very different from it’s figurative meaning. We propose a new neural approach to leverage the definition of each Chengyu and incorporate it as background knowledge. Experiments on both Chengyu cloze test and coherence checking in college entrance exams show that our system achieves 89.5% accuracy on cloze test and outperforms human subjects who attended competitive universities in China. We will make all of our data sets and resources publicly available as a new benchmark for research purposes.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of different reading comprehension testing techniques on the arousal of cognitive fatigue in test takers. Additionally, the researchers investigated whether cognitive fatigue might be affected by the test takers’ IQ and cognitive styles. Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices and Group Embedded Figures Test were used for mea suring test takers’ IQ and cognitive style, respectively. Two groups of 15 students were asked to answer the MC passage comprehension and MC rational cloze test in 90 minutes. Subsequently, both groups were asked to perform the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Continuous Performance Test used to measure cognitive fatigue. The findings showed no significant difference between the two reading groups in terms of their cognitive fatigue. Moreover, no significant differences were

It is commonly believed that Nigerian students perform very poorly in the English language. Many reasons adduced to be the causative variables for students’ poor performance in the English language are located away from the students themselves. What the above scenario portends is that no effort has been made to find out the strategies which the students themselves use in their efforts to learn the English language; it also implies that no effort has been made to find out the relationship between such strategies and the level of students’ performance in the target language. The problem which this study addressed was not only to evaluate the language learning strategies which the sampled study population use in their efforts to learn English, but also to determine the extent to which their mean achievement scores in English depend on their use of various language learning strategies. The study was carried out using a descriptive survey research design. Its population consisted of Senior Secondary School (SSS) form II students in three states of south-eastern Nigeria. Random sampling technique was used to select a total of one thousand, four hundred and one (1401: 747 = males, 654 = females) students used for the study. Two sets of instrument were used to collect data for the investigation: appraisal instrument (cloze test), and questionnaire. Two research questions and corresponding two null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. Results of the study revealed that 1) the greatest proportion of the Igbo learners of English in SSS II (84.3%) made use of socio-affective language learning strategy, while cognitive strategy had the lowest proportion of users (50.9%); 2) there was a significant difference, in the English language performance, between the users and non-users of the various language learning strategies.

A non-parametric study is carried out to investigate the power of video-based instruction in reading comprehension and metalinguistic awareness in learning a foreign language. We use a multiple choice cloze test in three different schools (school 1 with a no video-based instruction; school 2 with an approach to videos like single activities; and school 3 with an integrated video-based instruction) of 6th grade in Primary Education. Thirty students answer the test. The cloze test belongs to the test TAELIS (Test for the Assessment of the English Language in the School). Results offer significant statistical differences among the three schools. The school with an integrated video-based instruction obtained the highest mean in the multiple choice cloze test very closed indeed to the mean of the school using videos as a single task. Therefore, multiple comparisons based on Mann-Whitney test for two independent samples were also carried out. Results confirm significant statistical differences between school 2 (single videos) and 3(video-based). This assumes students are exposed to more reading practice, words become familiar and the orthographic lexicon increases. Therefore, students develop the capacity to play with language that has an influence on metalinguistic awareness. Finally, some techniques for teachers are provided in order to develop metalinguistic awareness from video-based instruction from a reading based approach.

The Readability of the Indonesian Textbook Discourse "Ekspresi Diri dan Akademik" Second Edition Using Cloze Test Methode On Grade X SMAN 1 Makassar. This research aimed to describe the readability of discourse in the Indonesian textbook "Ekspresi Diri dan Akademik" Second Edition on grade X SMAN 1 Makassar. The method used in this research is a quantitative survey methods that describe the readability level of the Indonesia textbook "Ekspresi Diri dan Akademik" Second Edition on grade X at SMAN 1 Makassar. The population of this research was all students of grade X at SMAN 1 Makassar. Sampling on this population was selected by using cluster random sampling. The sample in this research there were two classes, X MIA 5 and X IIS 3. Data collection techniques in this research is the cloze test. Data obtained using the formula cloze test. The results showed that out of the eight tested discourse to the students there are six discourse that is at the readability level independent/easy. There is a discourse belonging to the category of reading level instructional/medium. Average readability level was 68% overall discourse in the category reading level independent/easy, indicating that the level of discourse is very high readability. Results like that makes the discourse in the Indonesian Textbooks "Ekspresi Diri dan Akademik" Second Edition on grade X published by the Ministry of Education and Culture is not good enough to be used as teaching materials.

Reading comprehension is the procedure of making meaning from text. The goal, therefore, is to gain an overall understanding of what is described in the text rather than to get meaning from isolated words or sentences. The objectives of the study were to compare the reading comprehension ability between Boys and Girls students through two types of tests. Tests were administered on 520 samples from 10 schools (Boys'-5, Girls'-5) of North 24 Pgs. The collected data were analyzed by Mann- Whitney Test. The major findings were observed that in all section Girls scored better than Boys. The probable causes behind this type of result were discussed., © The Secretary, Ramakrishna Mission Sikshanamandira

With the rise of multilingualism, studies have proliferated that investigate the interaction of the different languages. The study presented here sets out to examine the role that proficiency plays on the occurrence of a specific interaction, namely interlanguage transfer from a prior non–native language (L2 German) upon another non–native language (L3 English) at the level of syntax in Spanish/ Catalan bilinguals. Data were collected from 80 learners of L3 English who were at different proficiency levels (as indicated by a 30-item cloze test), while data for the analysis of transfer was elicited using a story telling task. Statistical tests revealed significant differences across proficiency levels, i.e. low and pre–intermediate (p= .032), low and intermediate levels (p= .000), and pre–intermediate and intermediate levels (p= .018). Título en español: “Una indagación sobre el papel de la proficiencia en L3 sobre la influencia transversal en la adquisición de terceras lenguas”Resumen: Con el crecimiento del multilingüismo, han proliferado los estudios que investigan la interacción entre diferentes lenguas. El presente estudio se plantea examinar el rol que desempeña la proficiencia en la ocurrencia de un tipo específico de interacción, a saber, transferencia entre interlenguas de una lengua no nativa (L2 Alemán) a otra lengua no nativa (L3 Inglés) a nivel sintáctico en bilingües Castellano/ Catalán. Se recogieron datos de 80 aprendices de L3 Inglés que estaban en diferentes niveles de proficiencia (como indicó un cloze test de 30 ítems), mientras que los datos para el análisis de la transferencia se elicitaron empleando una tarea narrativa. Los tests estadísticos realizados revelaron diferencias significativas entre niveles bajo y pre–intermedio (p= .032), bajo e intermedio (p= .000) y pre–intermedio e intermedio (p= .018).

This paper explores the attitudes of Serbian tertiary-level EFL students towards doing a particular type of language exercise, a cloze test, and their attitudes towards music-based cloze tests in particular, as well as their general attitudes towards the inclusion of music into EFL classes at university level of study. It is comprised of two parts. The theoretical part reviews reference materials related to significant effects of music on FL learning in general and EFL learning in particular. The empirical part presents the results of the empirical research conducted with fourth-year students of the English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The method used was descriptive together with the scaling technique and the five-level Likert scale consisting of 5 items. The first two items tested the students’ attitudes towards conventional cloze tests, the third item examined their attitude towards music-based cloze tests, and the remaining two items tested the students’ attitudes towards the integration of music-based exercises into EFL classes and the beneficial effects of music on EFL learning. The results of the empirical research confirmed the starting premise, i.e. that tertiary-level EFL students consider cloze tests important for the improvement of their proficiency in English and that they agree with the statement that the use of music in their classes is beneficial for improving their skills.

Research conducted with monolingual native Spanish speakers has yielded discrepant results concerning the loss or maintenance of the subjunctive, whereas studies conducted with heritage speakers point to a gradual subjunctive loss (Montrul 2009; Mikulski 2010; Silva-Corvalán 1994a, 1994b, 2001). Cross-dialectal studies (Blake 1982; De Sterck 2000; Fernández Ulloa & Portillo Mayorga 2000; Menegotto 2003, 2004, 2008) have mainly focused on past tenses, and scarce are cross-dialectal studies investigating native speakers’ subjunctive use in the present tense. This study examines mood use by means of an acceptability test and a forced choice cloze test conducted by native speakers of two varieties of Spanish. One hundred and four adult monolingual native speakers of Spanish participated in the study — N = 56 from Rosario, Argentina and N = 56 from Toledo, Spain. Results indicate an overall vitality of the subjunctive and also reveal slight differences regarding acceptability based on gender and region.