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The effect of cloze procedures upon the reading comprehension of grade five students using the direct teaching of context clues with different intensities and deletion systems

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cloze procedure in developing reading comprehension where two types of word classes, noun/verb and connectives, were deleted in the construction of the cloze passages used. The noun/verb and connective deletions represented two types of context clues—presentation clues and idea clues. The study also investigated how well childrem developed a specific knowledge of connectives. In addition, the study examined the effects of intensive teaching as contrasted with non-intensive teaching and the effect of the treatment on three comprehension levels, High, Middle and Low. Twenty intact classrooms, consisting of 434 students, were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and one control group. The experimental groups were assigned to treatment conditions that included cloze exercises that had either noun/verb deletions or cloze exercises that had connective deletions. The four experimental groups received either intensive teaching or non-intensive teaching. Each of the experimental groups completed 23 cloze exercises during the 8-week treatment period. The control group, consisting of four classes, received reading instruction from the developmental reading programs existing in the schools at the time. Data were collected on two occasions during the research period. Pre-treatment data were collected through the administration of a Cloze Comprehension Teat and a standardized test, the reading achievement subtest of the Canadian Test of Basic Skills, Level 10, Form 3M. Post-treatment data were collected through the administration of a post-treatment Cloze Comprehension Test, a reading subtest of the Canadian Test of Basic Skills, Level 11, Form 4M, and Robertson Written Connectives Test. The accumulated data were analyzed by means of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The pre-treatment scores obtained on the Cloze Comprehension Test were used as the covariate in the analysis of the data. Fairwise comparison of means were examined by the application of Scheffe's test at the .05 level of statistical significance. The statistical analysis of the data resulted in the following findings: 1. No statistically significant differences were found between the treatment groups when comprehension scores on the Canadian Test of Basic Skills or the post-treatment Cloze Comprehension Test were analyzed. 2. While analyzed data showed statistically significant differences between the three ability groups when scores from the Canadian Test of Basic Skills were analyzed, there was no statistically significant difference between the Middle and Low ability groups when scores from the Cloze Comprehension Test were analyzed. 3. Statistically significant differences between the five treatment groups were observed when scores from the Robertson Written Connectives Test were analyzed. 4. A statistically significant difference between the High ability group and the Middle and Low ability groups was observed when scores on the Robertson Written Connectives Test were analyzed. However, a statistically significant difference was not observed between the Middle and Low ability groups. The results of this study led to the conclusions that while the cloze procedure was not successful in effecting differential comprehension scores, it seems the cloze procedure and the cloze procedure lessons, as they were prepared for this study, were effective in developing a knowledge of connectives. The results also generated some recommendations that might result in the cloze procedure being more effectively used in developing comprehension abilities.

Text

2010-08-11

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27255

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

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