Cloze tests are commonly used in language testing as a quick measure of overall language ability or reading comprehension. A problem for the analysis of cloze tests with item response theory models is that cloze test items are locally dependent. This leads to the violation of the conditional or local independence assumption of IRT models. In this…

A C-Test is a gap-filling test for measuring language competence in the first and second language. C-Tests are usually analyzed with polytomous Rasch models by considering each passage as a super-item or testlet. This strategy helps overcome the local dependence inherent in C-Test gaps. However, there is little research on the best polytomous…

Although there are many methods available for assessing text comprehension, the cloze test is not widely acknowledged as one of them. Critiques on cloze testing center on its supposedly limited ability to measure comprehension beyond the sentence. However, these critiques do not hold for all types of cloze tests; the particular configuration of a…

Panahi and Mohebbi review James Dean Brown's 50-years of research in language testing, curriculum development and research statistics with reference to an impressionistic framework for analysis containing two components with their subcomponents: Annotations (i.e., briefing and implications) and main concepts and themes (i.e., testing and teaching…

In this study the validity of partial dictation as a measure of overall language proficiency was examined. Two partial dictation tests along with a C-Test, a cloze test, and a reading comprehension test, as criterion measures, were administered to a group of Iranian EFL learners. The coefficients of correlation between partial dictation and…

Students with and without learning disabilities often struggle to learn a foreign language (FL). Teachers could benefit from a measure designed to screen and identify students at risk for FL learning difficulties. In this study, we examined the reliability and validity of scores from four curriculum-based measures (CBM) as potential indicators of…

In this study, the cloze-elide test was developed and administered under time constraints. This research is aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the speeded cloze-elide test and investigate its relationship with reading comprehension, C-Test, and multiple-choice cloze test. Processing speed is a vital indicator to distinguish high to…

The C-test as a measure of first and second language proficiency suffers from ceiling effect. That is, the C-test is very easy for native speakers and for advanced second language learners and many examinees obtain full scores. Therefore, the test cannot distinguish among advanced learners or native speakers. Speeded C-test is suggested as a…

In this study the magnitudes of local dependence generated by cloze test items and reading comprehension items were compared and their impact on parameter estimates and test precision was investigated. An advanced English as a foreign language reading comprehension test containing three reading passages and a cloze test was analyzed with a…

Reversing the original C-Test (Raatz & Klein-Braley, 1981), the modified C-Test (mC-Test) deletes the "first" half (instead of the second half) of every second word (Boonsathorn, 1987). It is also known as the X-Test (Cleary, 1988; Prapphal, 1994, 1996). This web-based version was explored to investigate its reliability, face…

C-tests are a specific variant of cloze tests that are considered time-efficient, valid indicators of general language proficiency. They are commonly analyzed with models of item response theory assuming local item independence. In this article we estimated local interdependencies for 12 C-tests and compared the changes in item difficulties,…

Performing routines in interlanguage is vitally important for EFL learners since it can cause embarrassment between speakers from different cultures. The present study aims to 1) investigate the reliability and validity of an interlanguge pragmatic competence test on routines in a Chinese EFL context with multiple choice discourse completion task…

This study addresses the issue of the optimal number of gaps in C-Test passages. An English C-Test battery containing four passages each having 40 blanks was given to 104 undergraduate students of English. The data were entered into SPSS spreadsheet. Out of the complete data with 160 blanks seven additional datasets were constructed. In the first…

The "cloze" test is one possible investigative instrument for predicting text comprehensibility. Conceptual coding of student replacement of deleted words has been considered to be more valid than exact coding, partly because conceptual coding seemed fairer to poorer readers. This paper reports a quantitative study of 447 Australian…

The reliability and validity of three curriculum-based measures as indicators of learning English as a foreign language were examined. Participants were 260 Dutch students in Grades 8 and 9 who were receiving English-language instruction. Predictor measures were maze-selection, Dutch-to-English word translation, and English-to-Dutch word…