Validating Bundled Gap Filling – Empirical Evidence for Ambiguity Reduction and Language Proficiency Testing Capabilities

Bundled gap filling exercises (Wojatzki et al., 2016) were recently introduced as a promising new exercise type to complement or even replace single gap-fill tasks. However, it is not yet confirmed that the applied creation method works properly and it is still to be investigated if bundled gap-fill tests are a suitable method for assessing language proficiency. In this paper, we address both issues by varying the construction methods and by conducting a user study with 75 participants in which we also measure externally validated language proficiency. We find that the originally proposed way to construct bundles is indeed minimizing their ambiguity, but that further investigation is needed to determine which aspects of language proficiency they are actually measuring.