Test-taking Strategies for the Cloze by Skilled and Less Skilled EFL Readers

Abstract

This study investigated EFL Korean readers’ test-taking strategies for the discourse cloze test and examined differences in strategy use in terms of their reading proficiency. The data collected from their retrospective verbal reports were analyzed according to a modified framework of Bachman (1985), Sasaki (2000) and Yamashita (2003). The findings revealed that overall, multiple strategy use was prevalent and text-level strategies were employed most frequently. The skilled students used more strategies, and were better at using information from a wider discourse context than the less skilled. Therefore, the discourse cloze reflected well global reading comprehension and discriminated well between the skilled and the less skilled groups, which supports the usefulness of the cloze as a measure of reading comprehension.