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Presenters
M. Raouf Moini,
University of Kashan:
Neda Karimi
Azad University of Najafabad

Title
The interface between c-test performance and lexical variation

Abstract

There are few accounts of the relationship between text characteristics and C-test performance in the literature. The present study set out to contribute to this line of research. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between lexical variation of the C-test texts and the test takers' performance.  Lexical variation of the C-test texts was determined through type/token ratio. In doing so two C-tests, each with five texts and total blanks of 100, were developed and validated. The texts for the two C-tests shared the same readability level, lexical sophistication index, topic, and number of words but were different in their type/token ratio. 100 graduate students majoring TEFL took the tests but in the final analyses performance of 77 of them were used. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the performance of the test takers on the C-test of lower lexical variation and C-test of higher lexical variation. The performance of the participants was poorer on C-tests with texts of higher lexical variation. The results shed more light on the biases in the C-test performance. The findings can have implications for the text selection stage of various text-dependent reduced redundancy tests in general, and the C-test in particular.

Key words: C-test, Lexical variation, Type/Token ratio