A Factor Analysis of the Cloze Procedure and Other Measures of Reading and Language Ability

Factor Analysis of the Ability to Comprehend Time-Compressed Speech

“…In the present study, the Cloze factor was empirically separated from the Comprehension factor, yet these two factors correlated .47 in the oblique analysis presented in Analysis 2 of Table 4. This correlation, .47, is comparable to the corresponding .61 correlation between these two factors for the Weaver and Kingston (1963) data, as determined by a re-analysis of their reported correlation matrix. Hopefully, future research and rationale will adjudicate the precise status of the cloze technique when measuring comprehension.…”

“…It was somewhat surprising that the cloze comprehension tests and the chunked comprehension tests loaded mainly on separate factors. However, Weaver and Kingston (1963) found a similar separation between traditional comprehension tests and clpze tests using both standardized reading and listening tests. Although their reading and listening cloze tests were not comprehension tests (since they did not allow Ss to read or listen to the test passages in an undeleted form), their results might be expected to be similar to the present results due to the usually high correlation found between cloze tests given with and without an opportunity to comprehend the passage (see Rankin, 1965); The chunked type of test has been shown to measure changes in reading comprehension better than a traditional standardized test (Carver and Darby, 1970a), yet individual differences on this test still correlate highly with other traditional comprehension tests (Carver and Darby, 1970b).…”

Learning From Verbal Discourse in Educational Media: A Review of the Literature

“…He is supposed to guess words on the basis of the context or redundancy in the passage. His success or failure in doing so is partly a function of the inherent difficulty of the passage (including the inherent difficulties of guessing the deleted words) and partly a function of his general comprehension ability, which in t~n may oe a function of many factors--his verbal intelligence, his maturity, education, and experience, and perhaps, according to the results obtained by Weaver and Kingston (1963), a special aptitude for utilizing the redtmdancy in the passage. When the cloze scores are based on systematic deletions, a number of investigators (Taylor, 1957;Jenkinson, 1957;Greene, 1965) It has often been pointed out that the cloze technique measures a rather superficial kind of comprehension--the ability to follow the detailed ideas and grammatical patterns that occur within sentences or closely adjacent groups of sentences.…”

“…Usually the passage is presented in written form, in which case the missing words are indicated by blanks of a standard size. Peisach (1965), Dickens and Williams (1964), and Weaver and Kingston (1963) have demonstrated the feasibility of administering the cloze technique in an auditory mode: the passage is recorded on tape and specified words are replaced by some special signal (e.g., a white noise) plus time for recording answers, or the test is administered orally by a teacher who tells the pupils to guess a word whenever she claps her hands.…”

The cloze test as a measure of language proficiency: a statistical analysis

“…Anderson (1976: l), however, maintains that as there is no consensus on what reading tests actually measure, all that can be said about a reading test is that it measures reading ability. On the contrary, far more can be said about reading: notions associated with reading are 'redundancy utilization' (Weaver & Kingston, 1963), 'expectancies about syntax and semantics' (Goodman, 1969: 82) and 'grammar of expectancy' (Oller, 1973: 113). All these terms connote a similar process.…”