The present study was designed to investigate whether a good reader, by the fifth grade, will have attained sufficient knowledge of the language structure to enable him to more exactly and more appropriately reconstruct mutilated texts than a poor reader, matched for verbal intelligence level. Four 250-word cloze-treated passages were administered to twelve deficient and twelve non-deficient sixth grade readers, matched according to sex and the verbal portion of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. Analyses of variance failed to show any significant differences between good and poor readers except for a weak indication that good readers produced more exact replacements.

The purpose of the study was to determine if instruction and practice in using the cloze procedure significantly affected the reading comprehension of a group of sixth grade students.The population consisted of 157 students in eight intact classes in two middle schools in east-central Indiana. The experimental group, four classes at one school, received cloze instruction, while the control group, four classes at the second school, worked with basal reading materials.Findings1. There were no significant differences in reading comprehension achievement between students who had cloze instruction and students who did not have cloze instruction, without regard to sex or reading ability levels.2. Students in the above average reading ability subgroup, whether or not they received cloze instruction, gained significantly more in reading comprehension on one criterion measure than did students in the average and below average reading ability subgroups.3. There were no significant differences in reading comprehension achievement between males or females in the group that had cloze instruction and males or females in the group that did not have cloze instruction.Conclusions1. Instruction and practice in using the cloze procedure did not significantly affect the reading comprehension achievement of the study population.2. Whether or not they had cloze instruction, students in the above average reading ability range gained more in reading comprehension achievement than did students classified as average or below average readers.3. Reading comprehension achievement was not significantly different for males or females, regardless of whether or not they received cloze instruction

Cloze procedure involves the skills of thinking, understanding , reading and writing based on the learners underlying knowledge of reading comprehension and writing subskills such as grammar and sentence construction. It is regarded as a very efficient test for measuring students integrative competence in English, and has been used in most of the important English tests in China. It is also used as a teaching instrument to help students to improve their reading competence. However, a majority of students perform poorly in cloze tests and they regard it as the most difficult and most unpopular part of the English test. The aim of this study was to find out the problem that Chinese students have with cloze tests and to determine whether they are associated with the inefficient use of reading strategies.

Magister Educationis - MEd / Cloze procedure involves the skills of thinking, understanding , reading and writing based on the learners underlying knowledge of reading comprehension and writing subskills such as grammar and sentence construction. It is regarded as a very efficient test for measuring students integrative competence in English, and has been used in most of the important English tests in China. It is also used as a teaching instrument to help students to improve their reading competence. However, a majority of students perform poorly in cloze tests and they regard it as the most difficult and most unpopular part of the English test. The aim of this study was to find out the problem that Chinese students have with cloze tests and to determine whether they are associated with the inefficient use of reading strategies. / South Africa

The purpose of this research was to develop and test a three-section cloze test of English proficiency and to norm it for use as a means of level placement. The study sample consisted of ESL students at Brookhaven Community College and the Intensive English Language Institute of North Texas State University, as well as a group of native speakers. Four types of statistical analysis were used: analysis of variance, Pearson product-moment correlations, a t-Test, and a multiple comparison procedure, the Scheffé test. The cloze test was sensitive to significant differences between every level at both schools. Subsequently it was normed to a four-level system and score ranges for each level were suggested.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-02-16T19:31:36Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana Fachinelli Vieira.pdf: 2258256 bytes, checksum: cc0dfba5410d79011aa66e7bab910602 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-16T19:31:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana Fachinelli Vieira.pdf: 2258256 bytes, checksum: cc0dfba5410d79011aa66e7bab910602 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-06 / Fundação São Paulo - FUNDASP / Introduction: Reading is an important practice to communicate and to understand the world around us, thus helping individuals to act socially actively and critically. Some researches indicate that deaf subjects have significant difficulties in reading comprehension. Objective: To assess reading comprehension in deaf professionals from a higher education institution. Method: Case study: 14 adult subjects, deaf, literate, both male and female, aged between 20.6 and 42.7 years. Procedure: Phase 1: Application of Cloze Test on a journalistic text with approximately 200 words. Each subject was instructed to fill in the blanks (30) with the appropriate words to the content of the text. Phase 2: According to the results obtained by the subjects in Cloze test, they were asked to perform a new linguistic task: reading followed by the preparation of a written summary of the original text.06 subjects accepted to participate in this phase. Criteria for results interpretation: the answers provided in Cloze test were ranked as: correct (identical to the original text), possible (other than the original text, but with appropriate sense), incorrect and no answer. A descriptive data analysis was held through absolute (n) and relative (%) frequencies, in addition to central tendency (mean and median) and dispersion (standard deviation, minimum and maximum) measures. The summarized texts were qualitatively analyzed with the following criteria: time spent, understanding of the essential content, understanding of complementary content, and inclusion of personal opinions. Results: Most of the subjects obtained scores significantly below compared to the maximum total score (60 points) of the Cloze test. Of the 6 phase 2 participants, only one did not included essential information in the summary of the text. Conclusion: the performance in reading comprehension, in deaf subjects enrolled, is hampered by the formal (morphological and syntactic) aspects of the linguistic code demanded by Cloze test; and favored by semantic and pragmatic aspects used to elaborate written summaries / Introdução: A leitura é uma prática importante para a comunicação e compreensão do mundo a nossa volta, contribuindo para que indivíduo atue socialmente de forma ativa e crítica. Pesquisas apontam que sujeitos surdos apresentam dificuldades significativas na compreensão de leitura. OBJETIVO: avaliar a compreensão de leitura em profissionais surdos de uma instituição de ensino superior. Método: Casuística: 14 sujeitos adultos surdos, alfabetizados, de ambos os gêneros, na faixa etária entre 20,6 e 42,7 anos. Procedimento: Fase 1: Aplicação do Teste Cloze a partir de um texto jornalístico com aproximadamente 200 palavras. Cada sujeito foi orientado a preencher as lacunas (30) com palavras que considerasse adequadas ao conteúdo do texto. Fase 2: Diante dos resultados obtidos pelos sujeitos no teste Cloze, eles foram contatados para desempenhar uma nova tarefa linguística: leitura seguida de elaboração de resumo escrito do texto original. 06 sujeitos aceitaram participara dessa fase. Critérios de interpretação dos resultados: as respostas do teste Cloze foram categorizadas em: correta (idêntica ao texto original), possível (diferente do texto original, mas com sentido pertinente), incorreta e em branco. Foi realizada análise descritiva dos dados por meio de frequências absolutas (n) e relativas (%), medidas de tendência central (média e mediana) e dispersão (desvio-padrão, mínimo e máximo). Os resumos foram analisados qualitativamente a partir dos seguintes critérios: tempo despendido, compreensão do conteúdo essencial, compreensão dos conteúdos complementares, inclusão de opiniões pessoais. Resultados: A maioria dos sujeitos obteve pontuação significativamente abaixo do total máximo (60 pontos) no teste Cloze. Dos 6 participantes da fase 2, apenas um não apresentou no resumo as informações essenciais do texto. Conclusão: O desempenho em compreensão de leitura, nos sujeitos surdos estudados, é dificultado pelos aspectos formais do código linguístico (morfológicos e sintáticos) demandados pelo teste Cloze; e favorecido pelos aspectos semânticos e pragmáticos mobilizados para a realização de resumos escritos

The aim of this study is to examine if pupils in the grades 4 - 6 in one school follow Swedish written language norms. The focus on this study is on the Swedish pronouns de, dem and dom. The English equivalent of de and dem is they and them. In the Swedish language we also have the pronoun dom, that is mostly used in colloquial language. This is interesting because its known that pupils today struggle with differentiating de, dem and dom in the Swedish written language. For example, many pupils use colloquial language dom in written language. There is also an ongoing debate about this topic, which I will go more into later in this study. The reason this research is relevant, is because the last time pupils in middle school years 4 - 6 was examined was in the in the 70’s and as I said there is an ongoing debate about the Swedish pronouns de/dem/dom. One of the things that the debate is about, is whether de and dem should be replaced with the colloquial language form dom. The two questions I used to come to a conclusion are: • What pronoun functions do the pupils have difficulties with? (object, subject etc.) • Does the position of the pronoun in the sentence have an impact on what form the pupils use? (does dem/dem här and dom/dom här occur before or after the verb). To answer these questions, I use two cloze procedures. One from Hallencreutz (1980) and the second one is from Håkansson & Norrby (2003). A total of 66 pupils did the cloze procedures. It was 22 pupils from grades 4, 5 and 6 that engaged in this study. The results show that (46 %) of the pupils used the colloquial language dom in the test. When it comes to pronoun functions, a majority of the pupils (59%) failed on the object function. The results also show that the pupils in my study mixed wrong use of dem/dem här and dom/dom här. Sometimes it was used before the verb, and sometimes after the verb. There was no clear pattern that dem/dem här and dom/dom här came after or before the verb, although it is said that dem/dem här and dom/dom här should appear more often after the verb.

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The definition of the traditional paragraph has remained unchanged for generations of readers. Yet today the predominant form of the paragraph on the Web is so new that it can only be called the new paragraph. So the question is which is the more readable of the two paragraph formats? More specifically, how can the new paragraph be defined and how can its readability be measured against the traditional paragraph? A literature review reveals that no attempt has ever been made to define the new paragraph. A novel approach is taken: collect the headline stories from the top 43 English language online daily newspapers and use them to define the new paragraph. They exclusively use the new paragraph format and 1200 stories were collected from them over a period of four months. The results indicate a drastic difference between the old and new paragraph with the new paragraph being on average less than half the size of the old paragraph. White space between paragraphs occupies almost exactly half a given story. Words of less than two syllables are the norm in a new paragraph. To determine the readability of the new paragraph, a test of readability was performed using human subjects. A passage of text was selected and formatted according to the rules for the traditional paragraph and according to the metrics of the new paragraph. The cloze procedure is then used to decide readability. The reading test‟s data is analyzed and the results and future directions of the study are discussed in the conclusion. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

The present study was conducted in order to determine if a relationship exists between those comprehension processes measured by the Paragraph Comprehension subtest of the McGraw-Hill Basic Skills System Reading Test and the cloze test developed for this project. Two classes of undergraduate education majors enrolled in “Foundations of Performance-Based Education” were administered both the cloze test and the multiple choice comprehension test. A correlation coefficient was computed between the summary scores on the McGraw-Hill and the summary scores on the cloze test. The results yielded a correlation of .021. These results did not support the research hypothesis.