Introduction
In the field of language testing, the notion of reduced redundancy (RR) has a principal effect on constructing language tests procedures to measure readability. Spolsky (1968) proposed the reduced redundancy principle (RRP) for devising tests to measure the ability of the test takers in language proficiency. The theoretical underpinning of reduced redundancy principle is that redundancy exists in natural languages to reduce the possibility of errors, ambiguity, and misinterpretation in communicating (Splosky, 1968, 1969). To construct the tests based on reduced redundancy principles, noise should be added into the authentic material or the portion of authentic text should be covered and present it to the test takers to reconstruct it (Splosky, 1969, Klein Braley, 1997). As a matter of fact, the performance of the examinees to restore the mutilated text as well as their skill to perceive the redundancy in the text are viewed as their level of language proficiency.
The most familiar reduced redundancy test is the cloze test which was introduced by Taylor (1953) as a psychological tool to measure readability. The theoretical underpinnings of the cloze test are based on the law of closure which is derived from Gestalt psychology (Taylor, 1953). Cloze test procedure is developed by dropping up the words based on some rules in the passage. The subjects need to complete the broken patterns and reconstruct the passage by providing the missing words where they are blanked out. Jonz (1976) pointed out two defects for the cloze test: “the provision of a range of choices and reduction in the number of items in the test” (p. 256). Multiple-choice cloze test was proposed by Jonz (1976) to overcome the shortcomings of the cloze. Multiple-choice cloze test provides sufficient placement accuracy, to simplify testing and scoring time as well as a limited range of choices (Baghaei & Ravand, 2016; Jonz, 1976).
According to Alderson (1979, 1980), the validity of the cloze test is sensitive to change the deletion frequency of cloze test and did not evaluate the homogeneous ability. Furthermore, there are some arguments about the reliability, validity, systematic deletion, and scoring procedure of the cloze test (Klein-Braley & Raatz, 1984). To remedy the drawbacks of the cloze test, C-Test was recommended by Klein-Braley and Raatz (1984). C-Test is a variation of the cloze test and thus has the same theoretical underpinnings and psychometric principles as the cloze test (Grotjahn, 1986). In developing the C-Test, parts of the words are omitted, not the whole words as cloze test ( Grotjahn, Klein-Braley, Raatz, 2002). In the field of C-Test, many quantitative and qualitative types of research have been presented to demonstrate the validity and reliability of the C-Test (Baghaei & Grotjahn, 2014a; Baghaei & Grotjahn, 2014b; Baghaei, 2014; Baghaei, 2010; Eckes & Grotjahn, 2006; Raatz, 1985). It has been studied in more than 20 languages and considered as an economical measurement instrument for assessing language proficiency (Baghaei, 2011a; Baghaei, 2011b; Baghaei, 2008; Eckes & Grotjahn, 2006).
Cloze-elide test also belongs to the family of reduced redundancy tests which is used as a language proficiency test and a reading comprehension test (Holster, 2017; Manning, 1987). According to Alderson (2000), “this variant of reduced redundancy test was proposed by Davis in 1960 and known as ‘ intrusive word technique’. It also had various titles such as ‘text retrieval’, ‘text interruption’, ‘doctored text’, ‘mutilated text’, and ‘negative cloze’. It was labeled as a cloze elide test in 1980” (p.225).
To operationalization of the reduced redundancy principle in the cloze-elide test, extraneous words are inserted into the text randomly instead of deleting words. The test takers are required to identify the extraneous words and edit the text by eliminating them ( Holster, 2017; Manning, 1987). Thus, the ability of the examinees to recognize the redundant words in the text are considered as their level of language proficiency. In other words, the more proficient language learner, the more successful they will be in identifying the superfluous words in the text.