Spanish adaptation of a cloze procedure to assess reading comprehension beyond the sentence level

The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553-572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared to standardized tests, we adapted the HyTeC-cloze procedure to create a version for the Spanish language. Therefore, this study aims at validating our adaptation. We extracted 18 texts from different school textbooks (Science, Language and History) and grades (6th, 7th, and 8th) and turned them into cloze tests, which were administered to 316 sixth to eighth graders from Chilean primary schools through an online platform. We also used a Chilean standardized reading comprehension test to evaluate the validity of our test. The correlations ranged from a low of 0.20 (for 7th grade) to a high of 0.58 (for 8th grade). Taken collectively, our data show a moderate positive correlation between both tests, which provide further evidence of cloze tests as a valid measure of reading comprehension beyond the sentence level.