Chain-preserving deletion procedure in cloze: a discoursal perspective

Abstract

It is said that one important aspect of education is the production of coherent discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This is the speaker’s or the writer’s ability to organize relevant meanings in relation to each other, and this in turn requires the establishment of ‘chain interaction’ - relations between components of a message - in a text. The more chain interactions we have in a text, the more coherent and, as a result, the more comprehensible it will be. Based on the above argument, the present study aims at investigating the effects of chain interaction impairment which may cost the test-takers’ comprehension of texts - itself being an object of measurement in cloze (Alderson, 1983; Francis, 1999) - and account for their low performance. It also aims at suggesting ‘chain-preserving deletion’ (CPD) as a pedagogical procedure.