Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

This paper evaluates ideas from selected studies into concordance-based cloze testing (henceforth ConCloze). The aim is to produce useful insights about its future directions from research spanning over three decades. The investigation is divided into five stages of evolution of the item type, potentially considered to resemble metamorphosis. Starting with an embryonic stage, advances in corpus linguistics in the 1970–80s are believed to give birth to the first concordance-based class exercises. The exercises then hatch out in the 1990s as an item prototype relying on the cloze procedure. Albeit with some substantive distinctions from the present form of ConCloze, this prototype may be deemed to be its precursor, and hence the larval stage. Then in the 2000s, the item type undergoes a silence period, receiving virtually no attention in the literature altogether. It is underrecognized for potential to contribute to language testing, and so the decade represents its pupal stage. Amidst some near misses seen in the literature, the present decade witnesses a growing interest in ConCloze. Centering primarily on its construct validity potentially marks a dawn of a series of validation inquiries. The future adulthood would begin by a momentum gathered with research along Messick’s (1989) validity facets. An inference from the investigation could be that concordances are useful for both supplying linguistic features to test writing and validation and making the very content for practical testing. Opportunities to test designers and English teachers worldwide are also implied, such as for a fairer assessment through a larger test-writing toolkit.