| Language testing is committed to language teaching. In the development of languagetesting history, we are in the communicative language testing stage now. Just asBachman(1996) proposed that “Our philosophy of language testing are as following:1.Relate language testing to language teaching and language use.2. Design your tests so as toencourage and enable test takers to perform at their highest level of ability.†To design thebetter test for certain test takers is the orientation of language testing development. Cloze testwas firstly developed by Taylar in1953. While in the following half a century, the researcheson cloze test have been pushed forward in width and in depth. But the researches on thetransforms of cloze have not reached any consensus. Meanwhile, cloze test was deemed to bea measurement to test the test takers’ overall language ability in the last70s, but whichabilities the cloze measures on earth are not for sure.The usage of cloze test in China is extensive. As a relatively mature testing method,many standard and large-scale English exams take it as a part, such as, high school entranceEnglish exams, National Matriculation English Test and National Post-graduate EntranceEnglish Examination. As the applications developed, more attention has been paid on thetransforms of cloze. C-test and banked cloze are two formats among them. So, it is practicaland meaningful for an English teacher to do some researches on them.This thesis focuses on the C-test and banked cloze which are compared in validity,reliability and discrimination by empirical methods. The subjects in this research are107sophomores and the data used in this essay were calculated by SPSS19.0software package.Then the author makes some conclusions and suggestions on how to make good use of thetwo formats of cloze tests effectively and reasonably. Two conclusions are drawn from thisresearch:1. By the analysis of the answering processes, the author finds when answering theC-test, the test takers tend to use more long-term context information but they tend to usemore immediate context information when they finishing the BK cloze.2. When used by onetext to test, banked cloze is superior to C-test in validity and reliability, but in difficulty anddiscrimination, the latter is a little bit higher than the former one. Finally, the writer puts forward some proposals on the usage of the two formats:1.Because of its high validity when used in one text, banked cloze is recommended to use inlarge scale exams as a part of the test paper.2. When using the C-test, the tester should followthe rules designed by the original developers to use it in a group of texts and make sure thetext takers are familiar with the content of the texts. The writer recommends using it in thereview section in daily teaching.The ultimate goal of language testing is to measure the test takers fairly and rationally.To find out testing forms which have high validity and reliability is every language teacher’sconcern. The focus of this paper is on how college English teacher can make good use of thetwo formats of cloze tests. |
