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By Domenico Pacitti Il cloze test in inglese: Ricerca, metodologia, didattica [The Cloze Test in English: Research, Methodology and Teaching] by Stefania Nuccorini. Published in 2001 by Carocci, Rome, 272 pages, €18.59, ISBN 88 430 1809 4. Stefania
Nuccorini's book consists of a 52-page expository chapter followed
by fifty English-language cloze tests. Each cloze test is
accompaned by a two-page commentary. A
cloze test may be defined as a short passage of continuous prose
in which a number of words have been systematically deleted. Cloze
tests are designed to allow the assessment of a student's reading
comprehension and other skills from his ability to fill in the
gaps correctly. The extent to which cloze tests actually succeed
in fulfilling this purpose has been a matter of considerable
controversy among TEFL theorists. In the book's first chapter, Mrs Nuccorini explains
that the word is spelt cloze and not close because
the former is a "contaminated form" of the latter (page
16). This she relates to the American habit of writing suffixes in
-ize instead of -ise. Mrs Nuccorini's perception of
US English as contaminated is most unfortunate and would appear to
reveal ignorance of the comparative histories of US and British
English. The truth, Mrs Nuccorini may be interested to know, is
that close was deliberately altered to cloze in
order to express the special meaning in Gestalt theory of
completing a pattern. The
remainder of the chapter is devoted to summarising the work of
scholars on how cloze tests should be selected, edited and
corrected and whether or not the list of missing words should be
supplied alongside each passage. Mrs Nuccorini's level of
scholarship in this chapters turns out to be just about equivalent
to the standard you would expect to find in a mediocre graduation
thesis at an Italian state university. Despite
the fact that Mrs Nuccorini's book was published in 2001, almost
all of the works cited in her bibliography relate to the 1980s or
earlier. Failure to cite important recent studies would appear to
reflect her ignorance of their existence and further reinforce the
impression of a rather slapdash third-rate effort. Moreover,
Mrs Nuccorini's exposition is not always easy to follow. This
appears to be the result of a combination of her clumsy Italian
syntax, her insufficient grasp of the work she is trying to
summarise and her poor knowledge of the subject. The
natural conclusion at this point is that she might have done
better to produce a select reading list instead of a book and
advise readers to consult the texts directly. But this would not,
of course, have served her immediate purpose of producing a
publication up to required Italian examining commission standard,
i.e. weighing as near to a kilo as possible. Such a reading list
would in any case have been seriously limited by the absence of
more recent studies. In
her introduction to the second part of the book, Mrs Nuccorini
acknowledges her sources. No fewer than thirty-eight passages are
taken from the same text (The English of Management, Politics,
Law and Economics edited by A. Caimi & G. Porcelli), again
confirming suspicions of a lazy approach based on limited
research. Mrs
Nuccorini also states that in the case of some texts she has made
"changes based on the 'cut-and-paste' technique".
Disappointingly, she fails to supply any concrete examples of
this. Perhaps that is because the technique is now taken for
granted, having been long employed by the Italian academic
community across a wide spectrum of disciplines for similar
purposes. There
is not much that can be said about the fifty cloze tests
themselves beyond mentioning some of the usual English errors. The
selection suffers from the fact that registers and topics are
over-restricted, partly as a result of having been drawn from too
few sources. The following samples briefly illustrate Mrs
Nuccorini's inability even to copy English words correctly and her
unflagging ability to misguide students: "The
question as [should be as to] how people should be
represented is as old as democracy itself." "He
was first tutored at home and then, at the age of eight, sent off
to Eaton [should be Eton] College in England." "On
completing ____ studies, Boiled [should be Boiler] embarked
on a 'grand tour' of France." Mrs
Nuccorini's chief first-person accomplishment in the book is to
have, as she herself puts it, "holed" the texts by
removing words. However, the confusing nature of the cloze tests
themselves reflects Mrs Nuccorini's inability to put the holes in
the right places, thus providing an interesting lesson in how to
perform a series of errors without actually saying anything at
all. Finally,
we were unable to locate this book in any of the university
bookshops in Rome or on any Italian university course syllabus,
including Mrs Nuccorini's. The tentative conclusion is that the
author herself may have been too painfully aware of the sheer
uselessness of her book (beyond the purpose of securing an
academic appointment) to bother trying to promote it in any way. Stefania Nuccorini teaches English Language at Rome's Third University, where she was recently appointed to a senior post. Note: This review was first published by JUST Book Reviews on March 23 2004. |
