The Relationship Between the Rational Cloze Test and the Discourse Structure Test

• Main Author: 陳文元
• Other Authors: 曾文鐽
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/57597111043121453207

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 96 === Considerable research on cloze procedures has shown that through meticulous, a priori identification of textual relationships, a cloze test can serve as an adequate measure yielding items that elicit specific language skills such as knowledge of cohesion (Bachman, 1982, 1985; Fotos, 1991; Stubbs & Tucker, 1974). This specifically constructed test is the product of the rational cloze procedure, as distinguished from the traditional, fixed-ratio deletion of every nth word. Since 1982, the rational cloze test format has been incorporated in the Joint College Entrance Examination (a term currently replaced by the Department Required English Test, DRET). With the rational approach, such a test can sample a variety of items at the syntactic and discoursal levels. However, the Discourse Structure Test (DST), a new test format with a gap-filling, cloze-like nature similar to that of the rational cloze test, has been adopted as an individual component in the DRET since 2002. The DST yields five blanks by extracting five complete sentences from a short passage. The test-takers have to choose among these alternatives to restore the text. Based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) linguistic analysis, cohesion provides the “continuity” that enables a listener or reader to restore the “missing pieces” in a text (p. 299). It can be hypothesized that knowledge of cohesion (especially intersentential cohesion) is critical for testees’ performance on the DST, in which each blank generates discontinuity in the text. Nonetheless, scores on the DST alone may only reveal how satisfactorily the test-takers tackle the test. Which aspects of cohesion (e.g., reference, conjunction or lexical cohesion) involved in the overall problem-solving process may not be projected straightforwardly. To interpret the DST scores on the theoretical ground of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) paradigm, a rational cloze test (RCT) comprising three subtests assessing different dimensions of cohesion (i.e., reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion) would be desirable. With intersentential cohesion argued to be critical for successful closure of the DST and the cohesion-based RCT, questions arose as to the extent to which the two tests were equivalent and how the RCT subtests predicted performance on the DST. The present study aimed to address these issues and investigate the relationship between the two gap-filling tests. A total of 354 students at a senior high school in central Taiwan participated. In a repeated-measure design, the DST was administered first in a session lasting about fifty minutes. The RCT was distributed to the same participants in another session. The interval between the two sessions was approximately two weeks. For data analyses, three phases were performed on 1) the reliability of both tests and validity of the RCT; 2) test equating of both tests; and 3) regression of the DST on the RCT and its subtests. The results showed that the two test formats were statistically inequivalent and that lexical cohesion functioned as the most influential predictor on students’ performance on the DST. Based on research findings, pedagogical implications can be drawn for English instruction and language testing.