Cloze Test and C-test Revisited: The Effect of Genre Familiarity on Second Language Reading Test Performance

The current study tries to investigate the particular role familiarity with the genre of the text plays in EFL learners’ performance on two types of tests, i.e. cloze test and C-test. It also attempts to determine whether C-test is a measure of language proficiency like cloze test. The participants of the study were fifty-one intermediate undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. In two sessions, the participants took a battery of measures (a) two newly developed cloze tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres, and (b) two newly developed C-tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres. The results of data analysis revealed that familiarity with genre has a significant impact on the performance of EFL learners on both cloze test and C-test. The results further disclosed that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency, and C-test with the same genre.