CLOZE TESTS IN ENGLISH, THAI, AND VIETNAMESE: NATIVE AND NON‐NATIVE PERFORMANCE

Abstract

A passage in English was translated into Vietnamese and Thai, and a passage in Thai and one in Vietnamese were each translated into English. Speakers of English (35 subjects), Thai (122), and Vietnamese (115) were tested on the cloze passages in their native languages, and the Thais and Vietnamese, all of whom had studied English as a foreign language (EFL) for at least six years, were tested in the English passages. Response types of natives and non‐natives were compared. Native speakers in contrast to non‐natives made almost no responses which failed to conform to at least some of the contextual constraints in the cloze tests. The errors of natives were not only fewer but tended to be different in type. Mean scores for native speakers on the originals and translations revealed that carefully translating a passage from one language into another yields cloze tests of approximately equal difficulty in both languages. Item analyses, and K‐R (20) measures of reliability ranging from .80 to .98 indicate considerable internal validity for the cloze tests used with non‐natives. A comparison of items (on the English passages only) by the grammatical category of the response(s) most frequently employed by natives, item facility for natives and non‐natives, and the determinacy of items stated in terms of the number of different correct responses given by native speakers, showed little obvious interdependence among these variables. The context of items was apparently much more important than any other single variable contributing to item difficulty.

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