This article reports on case-study research which explored English as a second language (ESL) learners’ perceptions of the role played by the literary cloze activity in the development of their language and literary awareness. The subjects, four students from a variety of language, culturaland literarybackgrounds, attended a semester-long university ESL subject which adopted a language-based ap...

The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy...

We present a strategy to improve the quality of automatically generated cloze and open cloze questions which are used by the REAP tutoring system for assessment in the ill-defined domain of English as a Second Language vocabulary learning. Cloze and open cloze questions are fill-in-the-blank questions with and without multiple choice, respectively. The REAP intelligent tutoring system [1] uses ...

s. No studies have investigated whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them. In studying this possibility, 90 subjects, 30 from each grade level, were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to Reprints may be requested from Ronald V. Evans, University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida. by gue...

Computer generation of cloze tasks still falls short of full automation; most current systems are used by teachers as authoring aids. Improved methods to estimate cloze quality are needed for full automation. We investigated lexical reading difficulty as a novel automatic estimator of cloze quality, to which cooccurrence frequency of words was compared as an alternate estimator. Rather than rel...

Cloze tests have been widely used for measuring reading comprehension, readability and language proficiency. There is still much controversy on what it really is that cloze measures. The result of much correlational research is contradictory and very unsatisfactory. Thus, with a qualitative orientation, this study attempts to look at the judgmental validity of cloze as a test of reading compreh...

We present evidence for a monitoring process in language perception at the word level, reflected by a P600. This P600 is triggered when a conflict evolves because the brain encounters an unexpected linguistic item when another item is highly expected. To resolve this conflict between representations, the brain monitors the input to check for possible processing errors. A P600 was hypothesized t...