An Analysis of the Third Year Students’ Ability to Complete Rational Deletion Cloze Test on a Narrative Text at the English Department of Bung Hatta University.

Abstrak

Cloze test can improve students’ reading skills because it requires the ability to understand context, to indentify the correct language or part of speech that belongs in the deleted passages. According to Helena (2018:16) cloze test is used to test some skills of English language, like reading, writing, and vocabulary. Therefore, students need to have the ability to complete a cloze test.

The purpose of this research was to describe the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test at the English Department of Bung Hatta University. The design of this research was descriptive research. The population of this research was the third year students at English department of Bung Hatta University. The total number of population members was 23. They were classified into one class. The researcher used total sampling technique. To make the test reliable, the researcher used inter-rater method. It means that there were two scorers to check the students’ answer. The correlation coefficient of two scores was 0.98. It means that the test was reliable. The test was also valid in terms of its content.

In general, the result of the data analysis showed that the third year students of English Department of Bung Hatta University had very good ability in completing rational deletion cloze test on a narrative text. In specific, the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test dealing with adverbs of manner on a narrative text was categorized as very good; the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test dealing with adjectives on a narrative text was categorized as very good; the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test dealing with past tense verbs on a narrative text was categorized as very good; the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test dealing  with subjective pronouns on a narrative text was categorized as very good; and the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test dealing adverbs of time and connectors of time on a narrative text was categorized as low.

Based on the result of this research, it can be concluded that the third year students’ ability to complete rational deletion cloze test on a narrative text was very good. The researcher suggests the lecturer to give more exercises about adverbs of time and connectors of time to the students, the students are suggested to do more exercises to improve their reading skill, and the researcher suggests the next researcher to do the related research with different genre.

 Key word: Reading Task, Cloze test, Narrative Text