An experimental study of cloze and essay writing for measuring grammatical ability of EFL students

Abstract

it is usually thought that knowing a language requires the ability to use the language, language teaching and testing should be integrative, i.e., they should complete each other. Grammatical ability of the language learners has traditionally been measured by indirect and non-integrative means like discrete-point tests rather than by integrative and indirect means like cloze and integrative and direct means like essay writing. The purpose of this study is to determine the functional relationship among three techniques for testing grammatical ability--two indirect measures (selected-deletion cloze and multiple-choice cloze) and one direct measure (essay writing). An experiment was conducted using intermediate level students from Bilkent University, School of English Language (BUSEL) in Ankara, Turkey as subjects. The goal of the study was accomplished by correlating the testing techniques with each other. The correlations were done using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation. Additionally, a one-way Anova was run for each set of scores to determine the variability of scores, and the descriptive statistics were also done to compare the means and standard deviations of these testing techniques. The results showed that the selected-deletion cloze and multiple-choice cloze did not correlate significantly with essay writing implying that the essay writing did not measure the same thing as the two cloze tests. However, selected-deletion cloze and multiple-choice cloze tests correlated with each other, implying that they seemed to measure the same thing. In addition, the result of the one-way Anova showed that there was no significant difference among these measures in terms of the variability of scores. However, according to the descriptive statistics, essay writing seemed to discriminate among the students better than the two cloze tests. Since the total number of subjects in this study was small, only 16, further research needs to be done with a larger number of subjects to determine conclusively how well cloze can be used as a functional measure of learner's grammatical ability.