The Influence of Cloze Tests in Assessing Tawjeehi Students' Writing Skill in English in Al-Adawiya Secondary Girls School

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Date
2018-10-11
Authors
أبو عابد, هالة
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An-Najah National University
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the influence of cloze tests in assessing Tawjeehi students' writing skill in English in Al-Adawiya Secondary Girls Schoolin English. To achieve this aim, the researcher used two instruments: Pre-test and post-test approach in addition to a 14-question interview. The study was carried out in Al-Adawiya Secondary Girls’ School in Tulkarm where the researcher chose 60female students from 200 female students and then she divided the selected students into two groups of 30 for each group the control group and the experimental group respectively. The two groups, at the beginning of the study, sat for the pretest that includes different language skills such as: comprehension, vocabulary, prepositions and other grammatical aspects to ensure that all of them were homogeneous. After that, the experimental group was provided with adequate training and was provided with cloze activities along with additional cloze exercises to do; on the other hand, the students of the control group were not provided with any support, they were taught traditionally and were not given similar material to that of the experimental group in regard to cloze test activities; still, they were given similar topics and activities. When the researcher finished the experiment, that is, almost at the end of the scholastic year 2017-2018,the two groups were post-tested by giving similar topics of the pre-test, the students’ responses were gathered and corrected by the researcher. After analysing the data of the two exams, the findings showed positive effects of cloze tests on students of the experimental group. In addition to the tests, the researcher used another instruments to collect more supportive knowledge, which was the interview. Results of the interview were in accordance to the results of the exams. In the light of the findings of the instruments of the study that showed positive effect of cloze tests, the researcher recommended teachers of English to use more question in their tests that focus on gab-filling to develop students’ different language skill specially writing skills and to assess them by using such technique. Another recommendation was directed to the Palestinian Curriculum to include more dialogue completion activities in the curriculum along with other cloze activities that require completion-based skills in real contexts in which they would use language skills via dialogues and texts that employ different deletion and scoring methods.
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