The purpose of this study was to investigate if there were similarities and differences between sixth grade Thai and American students' performances on two types of cloze tests: exact-word cloze and synonymic cloze. / The subjects consisted of 106 sixth graders from two schools: The Developmental Research School (DRS) of the College of Education, Florida State University, Talahassee, Florida and the Ayuthaya Teachers' College demonstration school in Ayuthaya, Thailand. The instruments for the American subjects were four social studies passages of 278 to 296 words selected from three adopted social studies textbooks. An every fifth word cloze test was constructed from each of the four passages. The instruments for Thai subjects were four cloze passages translated from the English version used by their American counterparts. / The cloze passages both in Thai and English were scored twice by the investigator, first by exact-word scoring and then by synonymic scoring. The mean scores of the two types of cloze tests (exact-word and synonymic) were translated into the corresponding comprehension levels: independent 60%-100%, instructional 40%-59%, and frustration below 40%. The null hypotheses were tested through the utilization of the t-test. / Results of the testing showed that the synonymic scoring resulted in a wider range of scores than did the exact-word scoring; hence, synonymic scoring was more useful in terms of predicting each subject's reading ability. The conclusions were: (1) The reading process in Thai is similar to the reading process in English with meaning rather than letters and words being central to the process. (2) At least beyond the beginning reading phase, both Thais and Americans read to determine deep structure rather than surface structure. (3) Sixth grade demonstration school Thai and American students read in their respective languages equally well. (4) The study supports the top down theory of reading at the readability level tested. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-07, Section: A, page: 2103. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75128 |
| Contributors | LOANGSITONGSOOG, SIRIPORN., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 103 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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