The effect of Iranian EFL learners' cultural knowledge on their performance on cloze tests

This study explores the effect of schemata activated by culturally familiar texts on test takers??? performance on cloze tests. It also investigates whether there is any difference in the performance of males and females on culturally familiar cloze tests. Eighty Iranian Pre-University students (male= 40 and female= 40) with the same level of English reading ability were selected. Three culturally familiar cloze tests and three culturally neutral ones were given to the participants in one session. Since the ultimate aim of this study was to help the Iranian students to have a better performance on Iranian National University Entrance Examination (INUEE), all the cloze tests contained the same characteristics as the cloze tests of the INUEE. While the results demonstrated that males and females did not perform significantly different on culturally familiar cloze tests, it was found that the performance of the participants on culturally familiar cloze tests was significantly better than their performance on culturally neutral cloze tests. The study, therefore, suggests that culturally familiar texts may help test takers show their true comprehension ability and in turn perform better on cloze tests. It also supports Oller???s (1995) explanation that a properly made cloze test can tap higher-order processing abilities that can, in turn, form appropriate schemata if necessary.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe