The purposes of this study are: (1) to investigate whether cloze forms with text-driven deletion method, proposed by Farhady and Keramati (1996), will produce better psychometric properties than standard cloze form; (2) to compare the psychometric properties of cloze test and C-test, both of which belong to the family of language reduced…

THE THESIS OF THIS REPORT IS THAT REDUNDANT PARTS OF A SENTENCE MAY EITHER BE OMITTED OR REPLACED BY NONSENSE WORDS WITHOUT LOSS OF COMPREHENSION. AND IF THE NONSENSE WORDS ARE IN A LANGUAGE FOREIGN TO THE READER, THEIR CONSISTENT USE SHOULD EVENTUALLY EQUATE THEM TO EQUIVALENTS IN THE READER'S LANGUAGE. GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE WILL ALSO BE ACQUIRED…

The main advantage to the twenty-question technique is that it can be extended to low-redundancy material, which previous methods could not measure. (Author)

A study examined the relative contributions of semantic and non-semantic sources of redundancy in printed English, which play a central role in information processing models. Subjects, 40 undergraduate college students, were divided into two groups. One group predicted missing characters using English text, and the second group was required to…

Redundancy in language reduces the possiblity of error and permits communication where there is interference in the communicating channel. The relationship between creativity (the basic distinction between language-like behavior and knowing a language) and redundancy has been clearly established. Knowledge of rules is the key factor in creativity…

Fries' definition of knowing a language rejects the layman's notion that the criterion is knowing a certain number of words. It involves, rather, knowing a set of items--sound segments, sentence patterns, lexical items--which must be made a matter of automatic habit. Various approaches to testing someone's use of a language have failed to take…

Classical cloze tests have been criticized as unsatisfactory operationalizations of the concept of reduced redundancy and the theory of expectancy grammar. Use of the C-Principle is proposed as an improvement over the classical cloze procedure. Such tests are constructed according to a technique that deletes the second half of every second word in…

THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF STUDIES DESIGNED TO INVESTIGATE THE SUITABILITY OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS WITH REGARD TO LEVELS OF DIFFICULTY IS REPORTED. THE STUDY ATTEMPTED TO DETERMINE WHETHER SOME RANGE OF DIFFICULTY MAXIMIZED THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION STUDENTS GAIN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF READING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS. IN ORDER TO FORM 129 PAIRS…

Investigates the usefulness of using grammatical cohesion to evaluate the macro- or discourse-level, and the micro-level reading comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students. Finds a relationship between anaphora and coherence that contributes to reading difficulty. (MG)

Cloze procedure, a testing method which systematically deletes words in written prose and then measures the accuracy of the information is reviewed from a historical viewpoint. Redundancy is placed in a verbal context and can be noted on three separate levels of language: (1) surface syntactic structure; (2) deep syntactic structure; and (3)…

A study was conducted to determine if increasing the redundancy of sections in scientific articles where typical readers became bored or confused would have a desirable effect on other readers. Undergraduate journalism students applied R. F. Carter's signalled stopping technique to two different science articles by indicating points where they…

One solution to the problems of discrete-point testing are tests of reduced redundancy, that is, tests that introduce interference into the communication through actual introduction of noise or through deletion of text and that ask the learner to perform in spite of the noise. Three test types were originally developed to operationalize the…