Professor J. Charles Alderson grew up in the town of Burnley, in the North-West of England, and is still based in the North West but in the ancient city of Lancaster. From Burnley to Lancaster, however, lies a journey and a career that took him all around the world to share his knowledge, skills, and experience in language testing and to learn…

This paper describes and supports (through citations of published literature) video-based activities that help English (and any other) language learners of all ages and skill levels to acquire and express integrated reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. The paper discusses the use of video to develop and elicit language with an emphasis…

Comments on considerations that have implications for interpreting the work of Shanahan and associates, which appeared in this journal in 1982. Reviews research that was either ignored or inaccurately reviewed by them and offers suggestions for synthesizing the results of research investigating the sensitivity of the cloze procedure to…

Special education teachers working in intermediate grades and in middle school grades face many challenges as they teach both developmental reading skills and subject matter material. Not only must they deal with the increased vocabulary and domain demands of teaching informational text, they must also handle the needs of students who have not yet…

Discusses two studies that explore the possibilities of adopting the C-Test (which involves the deletion of the second half of every other word in the text, leaving the first and last sentence intact) for testing Hebrew. Suggests the test be used with the cloze test for assessing similar things. (SED)

Warns that college reading instructors must be aware that standardized tests do not measure the types of skills taught in reading classes. Argues that reading instructors need to develop an awareness of what the scores on standardized reading tests do and do not tell them. (RAE)

Discusses the definition of readability, the history of readability formulas, writing adult materials to a desired readability level, matching readability levels of material to the reader's skill level, and uses of these concepts in adult education. (CT)

Suggests that readability formulas are methodologically flawed and inappropriate measures of the readability of materials written for adults. Argues that the cloze procedure is preferable because it assesses the readability of material by its intended audience. Notes that possible users of the cloze procedure include school systems, government…

Maintains that massive amounts of authentic input is the only way to approach listening comprehension in a foreign language classroom. Suggests listening exercises designed to enhance students' expectancy and to teach them to extract high-information items from a natural and redundant environment. (SED)

Critically examines the commonly used scoring criteria for cloze tests and presents a new semantically consistent scoring system. (FL)

Examines two concerns teachers have expressed over the cloze procedure--that of student frustration and of the impulsive child who does not complete the exercise. (HOD)

Presents four techniques, based on two philosophical premises, that are designed to extend readers' responses to literature: (1) literary sociogram, (2) semantic webs, (3) plot profile, and (4) Burgess summaries. (RBW)

Details the history of the concept of entropy and its application to information theory. Considers practical applications of the entropy concept in business communication courses. (PD)

Critically reviews an earlier published study that assessed the sensitivity of the cloze procedure to intersentential integration. (AEA)

Argues that informal reading inventories (IRI) and the cloze procedure may provide inaccurate information and inhibit the progress of poor readers. Examines the concept of frustration level in both IRI and cloze testing. Posits that, in attempting to avoid frustrating students, educators fail to provide students with sufficient challenges.…