The Cloze Procedure and Intersentential Comprehension in College-Level German

Abstract

The intersentential sensitivity of the mechanical deletion cloze procedure was examined in this investigation. A total of 124 college-level students of German participated in the study. One group of subjects completed a sequential cloze task, a second group completed a scrambled cloze task, and a third group completed an imbedded cloze task. The results revealed no significant differences between cloze test scores in the exact word or the acceptable word (synonyms allowed) scoring conditions. It is suggested that the cloze procedure may not yield a valid and reliable assessment of global comprehension in the second-language context. Reading is generally considered to be one of the most important second language learning skills. Most classroom activities depend on the students' ability to read the target language. The ability to read is also one of the few outcomes of the second-language learning process that students have the opportunity to utilize actively after the completion of their formal training. The cloze procedure has generally been accepted as a valid and reliable estimate of reading comprehension in the first and second language setting. Researchers such as Oiler, (1973), Chihara et al (1977) Cziko (1978), Clarke (1979), and Bachman (1982) proclaim the cloze procedure to be an objective, dependable measure of global comprehension. However, there have been a number of other reading researchers that question the intersentential sensitivity of cloze. MacGinitie (1961), Miller and Coleman (1967), Alderson (1979), and Shanahan et al (1982) posit that the cloze procedure is primarily a sentence-level or subsentence-level processing task that students can successfully complete without attending to intersentential comprehension. Given the widely divergent views with respect to cloze as a measure of global comprehension, it was decided to investigate the matter more closely.