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 article presents a framework for analyzing verbal report data, attempting to integrate Fillmore's levels of envisionment and Galda's differentiation between reader and text-centered responses. It examines the extent to which readers rely on text based, reader-based, or interactive processes to understand text. Case study data is presented.…

Concludes that the letter close procedure is an effective instructional tool for most elementary children and becomes increasingly effective with each successive grade level. (Author)

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…

Closely examined the effects of word length cues on cloze scores. (HOD)

Reports on an examination of three types of cloze tests developed from a fiction and a nonfiction passage to see if such tests showed promise for use in a pre/posttesting paradigm for investigating the acquisition of information from texts by reading. (Author/HOD)

This comprehensive, 300-item bibliography on the cloze procedure lists a significant proportion of the cloze literature. It is comprised of books, articles, and papers in which there is at least a substantial and/or significant cloze component. The references are arranged in alphabetical order by authors. Those citations that have been published…

Reports on a study that examined children's understanding of written direct and indirect speech by testing reading comprehension of two passages using cloze tests and referent location tests. Found that children have difficulty in interpreting written direct speech, especially when it contains a variety of pronouns. (ARH)

It was found that 1st graders could perform the cloze tasks, and cloze tests offered promise for use in evaluating the relationship of oral language performance to reading task performance. Cloze task tests were better predictors of end-of-year standard reading test scores than readiness and basal reader instruments. (Author/DB)

Describes two experiments where readers were asked to restore missing actions and physical and mental states to short narratives. Although some deletions resulted in violations of the event chain taxonomy while others did not, in both cases readers used knowledge of possible causal sequences to repair gaps in stories. (Author/MES)

Even when the readability levels of content passages are equal, cloze shows some content areas make easier reading. (RB)

Compares the predictive capabilities of readability formulas derived from cloze and multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. (RB)

Research indicates that a special version of the cloze procedure is a reliable test of reading comprehension. (RB)

Indicated that subjects with reading disabilities gave significantly fewer correct responses on cloze tasks, but they took the same time as subjects without reading disabilities. (RB)