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Conversational cloze tests for advanced learners
Paul Lennon is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature of the University of Birmingham. He has post-graduate degrees in Management Science and in Applied Linguistics. He has taught in Bulgaria and West Germany. His current interests are psycholinguistics and second-language acquisition.
This article reports performance on proficiency tests and ‘conversational’ clozw tests for a small group of advanced learmers of English at the outset and conclusion of a six months' period of residence at the University of Reading, in England, For each subject, responses at Time 1 and Time 2 for each cloze item are compared, so as to provide some insight into the linguistic developmental processes which learners may have been undergoing in the interim.
It is found that linguistic improvement deriving from extensive exposure to the target-language community in the absence of formal instruction did show up in scores on a written multiple-choice test, particularty for vocabulary, but that the conversational cloze tests separated out subjects more effectively.
From the changes in response made by subjects from Time 1 to Time 2, it becomes evident that the language of the advanced learner is characterized by uncertainty, that learning does not consist of a process of incremental additions to a fixed store, but that ‘backsliding’ occurs, as well as noncritical variation and improvement Learners would appear to differ in the extent to which they are satified with an ‘acceptable’ but not fully nativelike response, and in the indices of certainty they attch to their L2 linguistic repertoire.
It is finally suggested that the use of cloze tests with advanced learners may be beneficial as a teaching and diagnostic dveice, in alerting the learner to derees of liguistic appropriacy, and enabling the teacher to identifu both the over-experimenter and the under-experimenter among learners.