2002 Pan SIG-Proceedings:
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How C-tests workby Ellen Head (St. Andrews/Momoyama Gakuin University) |
This is a theoretical and speculative response to the paper given by Paul Hackshaw
on piloting fair and reliable tests. In his presentation, Paul described the C-test and
gave us an example to try, as well as a useful handout on C-tests from a website by
Ulrich Raatz and Christine Klein-Braley of the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg.
The C-test differs from a cloze test in that the initial half of each deleted word is given.
There is some experimental evidence to show that the C-test has a good correlation with
oral testing and is more reliable than cloze tests in which the initial portion of the missing
word is not given. Why should this be so? Intuitively, I feel that giving the testee the first
part of the missing word should make it easier to find the answer. Actually when we tried
to do the example question, many of us had trouble finding the answer to at least one
item. So why should C-tests be accurate? Perhaps the answer is to do with the way that
words are stored in the brain.
The traditional model of word recognition involves the idea of a mental lexicon through
which we search sequentially, rather as we look through a list of words in a paper
dictionary (Forster's serial search model, 1976). In the early 1980s under the influence
of artificial intelligence research, a rival model was developed, in which each word has a
corresponding "feature counter" called a logogen. A logogen becomes activated when it
gets a certain amount of evidence. For example, if the letter "t" is activated, all logogens
which correspond to words containing "t" will increase. If the activation level manages
to pass a threshold, the logogen "fires" and the word is "recognized". Evidence which
increases the activation level can be either perceptual or contextual." (Morton's logogen
model, described in Harley, 1998, p. 91).
The process at work when a student is reading a gapped text involves using contextual
information. Giving the first half of the word, as the C-test does, adds an element of
perceptual information. Hopefully, future research will be able to give an account of the
neuro-linguistic processes which are at work in language testing. Currently, processing
in the C-test is being researched by Dr Günther Sigott at the University of Klagenfurt.
An extensive bibliography on the C-test is available at:
A final thought as to a source of texts which could be adapted as C-tests: student-written texts might
be a nice source of material that is interesting to other students and
is not too difficult.
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