Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied LinguisticsVol. 64 (1984) ► pp.71–89
A Rationale for the Cloze Procedure
This article attempts to answer two questions : firstly, the question of what cloze actually is. Explanations using the principle of 'redundancy1 in the text and the 'grammar expectancy' of the decoder seem to be more satisfactory than theories based on gestalt psychology or the 'information theory'.
Secondly, the question of what cloze actually does. This would appear to be only satisfactorily answered by reference to the syntactic, semantic and rhetorical elements of language. Comprehension assessment for which cloze is often used is normally understood as getting at the conceptual world of the encoder. This cannot be directly tapped by cloze as it would involve skills over and above those accessible by cloze, such as skimming, scanning, reorganization, inference and evaluation.
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