سیمین ستارپور - ph.D. student, Tabriz university
پرویز آژیده - professor, Tabriz university

Reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. However, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. Thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice (MC) cloze test, and C-test as three different types of cloze procedure used for measuring reading comprehension. To this end, one C-test consisting of four short texts, one fixed ratio (n=۷) multiple-choice cloze test, and one cloze-elide test were prepared from reading passages with similar readability levels. The participants of the study were ۳۰ (male &female) freshman university students majoring in English literature. The results of ANOVA test showed that there were not any statistically significant differences at the ۰.۰۵ level of significance among the performance of the students on the three tests measuring their reading comprehension. Therefore, it was concluded that against the advocates of each test who claim superiority of it over the other types, these three types of cloze tests in this study assessed the reading comprehension in a similar way. So, the testers can be confident to make use of these tests as reading comprehension tests interchangeably.  

Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice cloze, C-test, reading comprehension