Cloze Test Research Articles

The Contribution of Radical Knowledge and Character Recognition to L2 Chinese Reading Comprehension.

Although there have been extensive theoretical discussions on the various component skills needed in comprehending texts in L2 English and L1 Chinese, empirical investigations on the component skills of L2 Chinese are scarce. This study attempts to fill in this gap by investigating the direct and indirect contributions of two lower-level latent component skills, radical knowledge and character recognition, to L2 Chinese passage-level reading comprehension. Radical knowledge was measured by a Receptive Semantic Radical Knowledge Test and a Semantic Radical Meaning Matching Test. Character recognition was assessed by a Lexical Decision Test and a Character Knowledge Test. Two tests, a Multiple-choice Test and a Cloze Test, were adopted to measure textual reading comprehension. The data were collected from 209 learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). Radical knowledge was found to have a significant direct effect on character recognition and significant indirect effect on L2 Chinese reading through the mediation of character recognition. Character recognition was found to have a significant direct effect on reading comprehension. Taken together, this study suggests the importance of lower-level character and sub-character component skills to L2 Chinese reading.

THE EFFECT OF POWER POINT PRESENTATION TECHNIQUE ON STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN LISTENING

The aim of this research was to find out the effect of power point presentation technique on the students’ achievement in listening. The research was conducted at MTs.S Nurul Amaliyah Tanjung Morawa. A quantitative with experimental was applied as the research design. The population and sample consisted of 60 students. They were divided into experimental group which was taught by using power point presentation and control group which was taught descriptively. Each group consisted of 30 students. The instrument used for collecting the data was essay cloze test by filling missing words. The test was used to obtain the students’ scores for each group. After finding the mean score, the standard deviation, and standard error of both groups, then a statistic t-test was applied. After calculating and analyzing the data, it was obtained that t-observed was 2.29 and t-table was 1.67 at t-critical 0.005 and df=58. Comparing both value, it showed that t-observed was higher than t-table (2.29>1.67) which meant that the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected. This research concluded that power point presentation technique gave significant effect on students’ achievement in listening.

On the Raising of the Finite Main Verb in Angolan Portuguese and in Mozambican Portuguese: Cartographic Hierarchies, Microvariation and the Use of Adverbs as Diagnostics for Movement

AbstractThis paper revisits the issue of verb raising in two closely related languages, namely Angolan Portuguese (AP) and Mozambican Portuguese (MP). Cinque’s (cartographic) hierarchy of adverbs is used to examine microvariation in these two varieties of Portuguese. The empirical data, gathered through experiments on acceptability rating tasks (to detect the position of the V(erb) in relation to adverbs) and cloze tests (to diagnose the adverbial classes which can be recovered by the elliptical VP), have been collected among university students in Luanda and Maputo, the capitals of Angola and Mozambique, respectively. The cutting points within the functional hierarchy where the V goes, be it mandatorily or optionally, are different in the two languages. In AP, the verb must raise past the frustrative aspect adverb (em vão/à toa‘in vain’), while in MP the verb must raise to the left of the singular completive adverb (tudo‘everything’). The main verb cannot raise past the AspTerminativeadverb (já não/não mais‘no longer’) in MP. In AP, it can optionally raise over the highest projection in the inflectional domain. Such a difference may explain the recovery of high adverbs in VP-ellipsis structures, only possible in AP. The corollary of the inter-linguistic study developed for Comparative Syntax is the adequacy of the cartographicdémarchewhen it comes to establishment of strict boundaries in the study of microvariation among closely related grammars.

Enhancing English spatial prepositions acquisition among Spanish learners of English as L2 through an embodied approach

Abstract English spatial prepositions posit a great challenge to Spanish learners of English as an L2 due to the broad cross-linguistic differences in how languages structure space. Furthermore, a teaching methodology that could assist these learners in understanding these differences is absent because the pedagogical treatment of spatial language draws on the longstanding assumption that the relation between this kind of language and its meaning is rather arbitrary. Yet, research within the embodiment approach to language and cognition has attested that the use of spatial prepositions is motivated by geometric and functional properties of figure and ground and how these interact in space. This study examines whether instructing Spanish learners on these properties will enhance their performance. 74 participants at a B1 level were randomized to either receive an embodied approach-based training on spatial prepositions (n = 37) or to the control group (n = 37) without this training. Both groups were presented with a cloze test (60 sentences) on six spatial prepositions, in, on, at, to, into, and onto on pre- and post-test conditions. Scores for both groups were analyzed using ANCOVA with pre-test scores as covariate. Data analysis yields statistically significant results attesting the effectiveness of the Embodiment Approach.

Readability Analyses of Integrated Science Textbooks for Junior High Schools in Ghana

This study investigated the readability levels of some integrated science textbooks approved for use in junior high schools (JHS) in Ghana. To assess the readability levels of the approved integrated science textbooks in order to ascertain their difficulty or ease, the researchers used the Flesch Readability Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Readability Formulas Cloze Test to determine the comprehension levels for a sample of students. A sample of 135 pupils, drawn from rural, peri-urban and urban JHS years 1 through 3 in the Ashanti region participated in the study. The outcome of the assessments revealed that the selected textbooks had a problematic level of comprehension for many of their intended readership except those who had additional resources for assistance. The study also revealed that these approved books employed long sentences and multi-syllabic words to deliver lessons and instructions, making them difficult for JHS pupils to understand.

USING COLLABORATIVE LEARNING APPROACH TO IMPROVE LEARNER’S MENTAL LEXICON OF WORD ASSOCIATION

A collaborative learning approach has been identified to lessen anxiety and allow more comprehensible inputs to be processed cognitively to result in meaningful outputs. This study specifically examines the effectiveness of the collaborative learning approach and its best fit model supplemented with several techniques to improve students’ mastery of the mental lexicon of the word association. This Classroom Action Research involved 60 college students in their senior years in Institut Teknologi Kalimantan. The data collection involved two cycles in which each cycle employed planning, implementation, analysing learning activities and learning outcome and finally reflection. To gain insight through each cycle, a cloze test and a survey were administered. Furthermore, the result was analysed qualitatively and the finding reveals a significant improvement in terms of the mental lexicon of word association repertoire especially in cycle 2. The percentage of the students meeting the criteria of success doubled at 71.67% while the students’ learning perception throughout each cycle was successfully maintained. Collaborative learning also helped most students to create a positive perception to level up their mental lexicon mastery

The Effects of Syntactic Awareness to L2 Chinese Passage-Level Reading Comprehension.

This study investigated the association between syntactic awareness and L2 Chinese passage-level reading comprehension among 209 Chinese as a second language adult-learners. The participants were administered a character knowledge test, a vocabulary knowledge test, a morphological awareness test, a grammatical judgment and correction test, a word order test, and two reading comprehension tests (multiple-choice questions and cloze test). Partial correlation analyses showed that the participants’ performance in two syntactic awareness tasks were significantly positively correlated with their passage-level reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses revealed that syntactic awareness made a unique contribution to L2 Chinese reading even when the effects of age, major, gender, length of learning Chinese, character knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness were controlled for. In addition, the word order knowledge had a stronger predicting power to L2 Chinese reading comprehension compared to the grammatical judgment/correction ability.

Examining Associations Among Emotional Intelligence, Creativity, Self-efficacy, and Simultaneous Interpreting Practice Through the Mediating Effect of Field Dependence/Independence: A Path Analysis Approach.

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is a cognitively complex activity due to the concurrent nature of receiving and producing messages. Previous research confirms that SI is profoundly influenced by cognitive, attitudinal, and psychological mechanisms. Following this line of enquiry, the present investigation proposes a unique model by integrating cognitive and psychological factors related to the professional performance in SI. Specifically, this study examined a model to test the predictive and mediational effects of emotional intelligence, creativity, self-efficacy, and field dependence/independence (FD/FI) on simultaneous interpreting. A total of 248 university students majoring in Translation Studies completed measures of General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES), Emotional-Quotient Inventory (EQ-I), Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), General Embedded Figures Test (GMFT), and two SI tasks, namely the oral cloze test (OCT) and the listening and memory recall exercise (LMRE). The path analysis supported the direct effect of creativity and its indirect effects mediated by FD/FI on SI. Emotional intelligence made only a significant indirect effect on SI through FD/FI. Self-efficacy, on the other hand, made only a significant direct effect on SI. Emotional intelligence and creativity also contributed significantly to the prediction of FD/FI. The analyses also revealed a significant correlation between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy and also between creativity and emotional intelligence. Finally, FD/FI directly predicted simultaneous interpreting. Other hypothesized associations were not found to be statistically significant. The findings suggest that psychological attributes can have a great impact on students' performance in simultaneous interpreting training exercises. Implications of the study and the research avenues are discussed.

Clozing in on reading comprehension: a deep cloze test of global inference making

Clozing in on reading comprehension: a deep cloze test of global inference making

Book Review: Assessing Second Language Reading: Insights from Cloze Tests

Book Review: Assessing Second Language Reading: Insights from Cloze Tests

Relating a concordance-based cloze test to the model of communicative language ability: a verbal protocol study

The literature of empirical studies on the concordance-based cloze test (ConCloze) is far and few between. This is despite the fact that it has a potential for item writing without the aid of native speakers and for making use of corpus-based technology in task design. This article explores the test-taking processes and strategies of a ConCloze item variant. The aim is to investigate the substantive aspect of the construct validity for the item type and increase the generalizability of the findings in the universe of admissible observations. The sample consists of 14 non-native English users who are in higher education and engage with 3 test tasks each, totaling 42 verbal reports. The sampling method is purposive sampling, in which their first language profiles are maximized in terms of heterogeneity for increased power of generalization. It is found that Reading concordance lines and recognizing clue words inside is a major process, and Assessing item components and testing a meaningful compatibility of a word in context a secondary one. A model of communicative language ability is used to provide a context for task use in this study, where strategic competence is represented in ConCloze substantive validity.

The Influence of Diglossia on Syntactic Proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic among Regular and Struggling Readers

This study examines the influence of diglossia on syntactic proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) among 63 fourth-graders in central Israel, divided into two groups: regular and struggling. They were given three examinations constructed especially for this study: translating sentences from Spoken Arabic Vernacular (SAV) into MSA, a cloze test, and an oral exam, in which the pupils were asked to describe pictures in MSA. The findings revealed errors in the use of connectives, the use of prepositions, sentence integrity, and verb conjugation. No significant differences were found between regular and struggling pupils in average test scores in terms of errors in syntactic elements. In using prepositions, regular pupils made more errors than did struggling pupils; this was because the latter did not answer questions relating to this element. Several factors explain the effect of diglossia on syntactic proficiency: the similarity of MSA and SAV, the influence of the surroundings, scanty reading of books, the teaching methods used in Arab schools, the influence of Hebrew on the Arab student, and the lack of encouragement from the establishment and the education system. Future research should investigate this effect on a larger sample in order to obtain more representative outcomes.

Autorregulação, estratégias de aprendizagem e compreensão de leitura no Ensino Fundamental I

ABSTRACT This research aimed to verify the internal structure of the Inventory of processes of self-regulation of learning, as well as to evaluate self-regulation, learning strategies and reading comprehension of students in the early years of Elementary School, verifying the relationship between the three variables. 259 students from two public schools located in the state of Paraná participated. The instruments used in the research were the IPAA - Inventory of Learning Self-Regulation Processes, the EAVAP-EF - Scale of Assessment of Learning Strategies for Elementary Education and the Cloze test. The results obtained indicated significant rates of use of self-regulatory strategies with relations of this construct with the metacognitive strategies and level of understanding of instructional reading. The data presented imply directions regarding the teaching action and educational practices in the school context.

Linguistic Dimensions of Accentedness, Comprehensibility and Intelligibility: Exploring Listener Effects in American, Moroccan, Turkmen and Chinese Varieties of English

AbstractThe present study examines accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility of American English, Moroccan English, Turkmen English, and Chinese English, from the perspectives of three groups of listeners: native speakers of English and Chinese speakers of English with or without international experiences. Of the 145 listeners, 38 had face-to-face interviews. These listener groups were asked to listen to the recordings of the four English varieties and fill in a cloze test. Results indicated that the three listener groups differed significantly in rating comprehensibility of American English, Moroccan English and Chinese English but they did not give Turkmen English statistically different ratings; there were no significant differences in accentedness ratings except for Chinese English; and there were significant differences in the intelligibility scores of the four English varieties. In addition, with respect to seven linguistic variables—speed, clarity, intonation, smoothness and fluency, vocal intensity, pause, vocabulary and grammar, there were significant differences in three listener groups’ rating of six variables in American English except the one of “speed”. By contrast, Chinese English received significantly different ratings only in “proper speed”. No differences were found in the ratings for Moroccan English and Turkmen English. Finally, unlike Chinese listeners without international experiences, native listeners and Chinese listeners with international experiences shared some similarities in correlations between the ratings of accentedness and comprehensibility and those of linguistic variables on Moroccan English, Turkmen English, and Chinese English. However, the results for American English from Chinese listeners without international experiences and native listeners seemed to be more alike. Linguistic variables correlating with accentedness and comprehensibility of American English showed a mixed profile. Qualitative data provided more variant elaborations on the pronunciations and language uses of the speakers.

Measuring Readability of Some Agricultural Extension Pamphlets Among Farmers in Some Villages in Assiut Governorate By using Cloze test

Measuring Readability of Some Agricultural Extension Pamphlets Among Farmers in Some Villages in Assiut Governorate By using Cloze test

An algorithm for analyzing cloze test results

We present an algorithm for the automatic processing of cloze test results that are traditionally analyzed and adjusted by hand. The algorithm accurately includes inflected and derived forms of the target word as correct responses, as well as minor spelling mistakes and typographical errors. We provide a test of the algorithm against the coding of one expert human observer and find that the algorithm performs with equal accuracy. We further examine the utility of the algorithm for the analysis of data involving word identification with typed responses. The routines are implemented in R-software and are freely available.

Causal pattern test and cloze test: a study of L2 learners using distributed models of conceptual representation

The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive processes involved in cloze passage and causal pattern tests. Two tests of causal patterns (one in Persian and one in English) and a cloze test were administered among a group of 30 participants. Correlations between participants’ scores were calculated. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between participants’ scores in each pair of the three tests. These results suggest that there might be similarity between causal pattern test and cloze test in terms of cognitive resources and cognitive operations that are employed during answering items of these tests. These similarities are described on the basis of distributed models of conceptual representation. Furthermore, it is proposed that there are some similarities between the strategies that can be employed by test takers to find the correct answers in these two types of test. The individuals who are better in simultaneous activation of various semantic properties, including semantic properties that are related to cause-effect relationships, are more successful in identifying causal patterns among various elements of a text.

The role of individual factors in L2 vocabulary learning with cognitive-linguistics-based static and dynamic visual aids

AbstractThe present study aims to verify the impact of dynamic aids on learning L2 prepositions in relation to individual learner variables. Situated within the cognitive linguistics (CL) framework and differing from previous research, the present study hypothesizes that dynamic (animated) aids are not equally effective for all learners; rather, their effectiveness differs according to learners’ first languages (L1s) (Chinese or Japanese) and information-processing styles (verbalizers or imagers). To verify this hypothesis, we utilized learning materials comprised of static and dynamic images for three English spatial prepositions (above,on,over). After conducting a Style of Processing questionnaire, we administered three cloze tests (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest) of target words to Taiwanese and Japanese participants (N= 109), whose L1s differed in terms of their linguistic proximity to English. Although no significant differences were found between the treatment groups in tests for all participants, the results were differentiated by individual factors. In results of a two-way ANOVA, Taiwanese participants showed significantly greater improvement from the pretest to posttest than Japanese participants when the participants used dynamic images, whereas the Japanese group made more learning gains from the posttest to the delayed posttest test. Moreover, imagers obtained more benefits from the visual aids, whether static or dynamic, than verbalizers. Our findings indicate that CL-based visual aids are beneficial and that individual factors, especially learners’ L1, may produce different learning effects, especially in multimedia environments.

Using WebClass for Reduced Redundancy Testing

This article examines and reviews two types of reduced redundancy tests, namely cloze tests and C-tests, which involve completing a text from which certain units (whole words or their parts) have been removed. Assessment instruments of this kind are typically used to measure overall language proficiency, for example for the purpose of making placement decisions. The paper also discusses the development of these two measures of reduced redundancy with the help of the WebClass testing system.

PENGEMBANGAN BUKU NONTEKS BIOLOGI SMA KELAS X BERBASIS PENGETAHUAN ETNOBOTANI DI KABUPATEN SITUBONDO

This study aims to produce non-textbooks based on ethnobotany in Situbondo district as a source of quality student learning with a valid, practical, and effective nature. The research used the Borg and Gall development model which consisted of 5 stages according to research needs. The research subjects were students from two class X MIPA at SMAN 1 Panarukan. Non-text books are validated by material expert validators, development experts, media experts, and linguists. The results of quantitative data analysis that have been validated by the validator with an average book value percentage of 85.75% are included in the eligibility criteria as very valid. The cloze test procedure results obtained an average percentage of 80.3% which is in the easy category. The average result of the N-Gain value is 0.58 which is included in the moderate effectiveness category. Non-text books that have been developed have good quality effectiveness, practicality, and readability to be used in classroom learning activities, especially on Kingdom Plantae material.