Usefulness of verbal protocol in examing construct of reading tests

This paper investigates the use of the verbal protocol approach in the construction of cloze reading tests and discusses its usefulness for examining the reasons that I had for deleting some lexical items from reading texts in order to construct a cloze test. The subjects in my study were asked to ‘think aloud’ as they did the reading test, relating all their mental processes including the way they approached the deleted lexical items and restored them. My observation of the subjects verbalising their thoughts revealed inadequacies in this approach. Consequently, I also interviewed the subjects after their verbal protocols. The analysis of the two sets of data suggests that the subjects, in their verbal protocols, did not verbalise all the points they could make about their mental processes.

1. Introduction
Mann and Thompson (1988) have developed Rhetorical Structure Theory, a text generation model in which they describe the rhetorical relations among parts of a text. Rhet...