Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

8-3-1971

Abstract

This study utilizes an interview procedure to elicit self-report, or intuitive, data from a sample of native and non-native speakers of English, all university students, on their recall of their strategies on the cloze procedure. Interview procedures appear not to have been previously used in the study of behavior on integrative language tests. Thus the primary methodological goal of this study was to determine if the interview procedure would produce valid information of practical use both to language testing specialists and to language teachers. A second major goal was to determine how the use of strategies might differ among native and non-native speakers of English, and among more proficient and less proficient members of the sample. A theoretical anchor for the study was provided by the construction of a model of text comprehension, based on the nature of the intuition of linguistic rules within a pragmatic, discourse-centered grammar. The model was built on three elements: the language user, who utilizes automatic and conscious knowledge, and a number of strategies as well as personal experience; the demands of the task, which were specifically discussed for cloze procedure; and the dynamics of performance which result when a particular user and a specific task interact. The data from the cloze procedure scores and interviews were analyzed in light of the theoretical constructs above. Among both native and non-native speakers of English, proficient performance on cloze procedure was found to correlate with automaticity, the use of implicit knowledge, and rapid and efficient use of discourse constraints, which often extended across sentence boundaries. Explicit grammatical knowledge was commonly reported only among the least proficient non-natives. Through the examination of interview comments, a typology of 13 comment types was constructed, which promises through continued elaboration to reveal much of the dynamics underlying performance on the cloze procedure and possibly on other complex tasks. It is concluded that any explanatory theory of language proficiency must deal with complex performance dynamics such as were discovered among this sample. Few qualitative differences were found between native and non-native speakers of English, lending support for the notion that performance dynamics are much the same in the first and second languages. Several strategies, particularly use of discourse constraints, were easily retrieved by most subjects in the interview, leading to the hope that such strategies might be further studied through interviewing, and be amenable to conscious learning. Other strategies were judged in need of longitudinal study before pedagogical suggestions could be made for them. The interview procedure was found to be a most promising instrument for continued experimentation in research on language testing and learning.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Secondary Education

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Robert Harold White

Second Committee Member

Rodney Wilson Young

Third Committee Member

Dean Guy Brodkey

Fourth Committee Member

John William Oller Jr.

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