THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL SCHEMATA AND PROFICIENCY LEVEL ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ CLOZE TEST PERFORMANCE AND RECALL OF PASSAGE

The emergence of socio-cultural perspectives in language education on the one hand and the recent trends towards more contextualized and authentic forms of language tests on the other hand have led practitioners to take more into account issues of culture in language teaching practices and of course in designing appropriate tests; tests which are namely fair and not biased toward individual test takers’ cultural values. This study is therefore an attempt to find out if cultural schemata and proficiency level affect Iranian EFL learnersʹ cloze test performance and recall of the passage. Participants included 144 freshman students at Islamic Azad University of Shiraz. They took a 50-item placement test (Oxford Placement Test) measuring their proficiency level, and two cloze tests (one culturally familiar and the other culturally unfamiliar). They were also asked to write whatever they recalled from the text after they finished the cloze test. The results revealed that both cultural schemata and proficiency level significantly affected cloze test performance and recall of the passage. It was also observed that more proficient students were less affected by cultural familiarity of the passage, and the cloze test scores correlated very highly with recall scores. Based on the findings of the study, test developers should be more sensitive to individuals’ cultural differences and proficiency level when designing cloze tests as integrative measures of reading ability.