CLOZE, DICTATION, AND THE TEST OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was taken by 159 non-native speakers of English in Tehran, Iran. They also took a cloze test and two dictations. The former was scored for both exact and contextually acceptable responses. A correlation of.94 between the two methods recommends the exact method for non-native teachers of ESL and concurs with the result of a study by Stubbs and Tucker (1974). Cloze scores correlated with the combined dictations at.75. Cloze scored by either method was more highly correlated with the TOEFL total score (.79, acceptable word method;.78, exact word method) than was the combined dictation (.69). Confirming earlier research by Darnell (1968) and Oller and Conrad (1971), both cloze and dictation correlated better with the Listening Comprehension than with any other sub-section of the TOEFL. This tends to confirm the suspicion tha the Listening Comprehension section, which is a highly integrative and pragmatic task, is more valid than other sections of the TOEFL. On the whole, Listening Comprehension, cloze, and dictation were more highly correlated with each other, and with the remaining part scores on the TOEFL than the latter were with each other. This last fact provides strong support for integrative testing procedures.