The Effectiveness of Using Cloze Tests in Assessing Reading Skills: To Accept or To Reject the Null Hypothesis, That is the Question

Assessing the skills of EFL/ESL learners has always been an important part of languageteaching. According to Oller Jr. (1994), the basic principle behind all language skills is theability to predict the flow of the elements. The best test to assess such ability would be acontextualized gap-filling test. Such a gap-filling test, the cloze test is an essential assessmenttool. Some researchers have found cloze tests to be a very valuable tool in many differentsituations, including the testing of reading skills of language learners. But, some researchershave found that cloze tests per se do not help learners achieve better results in readingcomprehension tests.This article will review some papers to identify the reasons why each group accepts or rejects thenull hypothesis of the effectiveness of using cloze tests. The result of some investigationindicated that the cloze test was easier than the multiple-choice test and had more power ofdiscrimination and face validity. The outcome of matched tests at the .05 level of significance(p˂.05) revealed significant difference between means and rejects the null hypnosis. Althoughthere was a little difference between groups, the difference is not important. This means thatthere is not much difference between the two groups’ Z-scores (-0.06 as Experimental Group Zscorevs. -0.05 as Control Group Z-score).

Keywords:

cloze test , reading skill , EFL/ESL learners , null hypothesis