Adult L2 Learners Need a Reading Comprehension Test: Is it a C-Test or a Cloze Test?

Abstract

Many language tests are used to measure language learners’ abilities, two of these tests are the cloze test and the C-test. However, insufficient research has done on the usefulness of these tests as reading comprehension tests. Therefore, this study attempts to compare the efficiency of the cloze test with the efficiency of the C-test as reading comprehension tests.  It will explore the main research question if there are any significant differences between the results of the testees on the cloze test and their results on the C-test as reading comprehension tests, in addition to their performance on both tests as advanced level and intermediate level learners. A C-test and a cloze test were administered to 80 international university students at Otto-von-Guericke University in Germany to answer these questions. The statistical analysis used in this study was the (t-test) to test the statistical significance of the differences between the two tests. Results revealed statistically significant differences between the scores of the testees in favour of their scores on the C-test. Furthermore, the results indicated that the cloze test correlated positively with the C-test. Contrary to the findings of previous research indicating that the cloze test is more efficient reading comprehension test than the C-test. It is suggested that this study can be expanded to wider population and to be used for testing the lexical knowledge of language learners.