A study of reading strategies and effects of reading ability levels and text types on rational deletion cloze test performance of first year law students at Khon Kaen University

Abstract

This research work was aimed to study the students’ use of reading strategies on their rational cloze test performance and to study the effects of reading ability levels and two text types, narrative and expository text, on the rational deletion cloze test performance. The rationale for item deletion was based on Bachman’s (1985) classification of cloze items. The subjects were 174 first-year Law students at Khon Kaen University in the 2010 academic year. All of them were divided into three different groups based on their reading ability. They took the rational deletion cloze test which comprised two text types. The research instruments used in this study were the reading test, the rational deletion cloze test, the reading strategies questionnaire, and the retrospective interview. The data on the rational deletion cloze test performance were analyzed using the Two Way ANOVA analysis with replication. The responses to the questionnaire and to the interview were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis tests, the Mann-Whitney U tests and the Friedman tests. The findings of the study were (1) there was a significant effect of students’ reading ability levels on their rational deletion cloze test performance (p < .05).; there was a significant difference in the average scores of students with different reading ability levels, gained from the rational deletion cloze test (p < .05) ; (2) there was a significant effect of the two text types on the rational deletion cloze test performance (p < .05); the average scores on the narrative cloze text were higher than the average scores on the expository cloze text; (3) there was no significant interaction effect of the reading ability levels and text types on the rational deletion cloze test performance; (4) the use of reading strategies while working on the rational deletion cloze test by the three reading ability groups was significantly different (p < .05); the high reading ability groups significantly used more reading strategies than the other ability groups (p < .0167) ; (5) there were significant differences in the use of contextual information as a source of information for restoring the cloze gaps (p < .05); the high reading ability students significantly used more text-level information than the students in other ability groups (p < .0167).