Cloze Procedure

The close procedure was a common procedure in reading and comprehension, but is not as commonly used today. In the classroom the close procedure can be used to take a textbook section and deleted selected words by a word count formula or by other criteria. In a subject area the words deleted may be important vocabulary words for that particular subject. In some cases the words that may fit can be printed at the bottom of the page or at the end of the reading passages. You could have all the words used for the deletions or more than all the words deleted, If a word is used more than one time, you could list it at the end the number of times that it is actually used or you could make a statement that says that some of the words listed can be used more than one time.

The purpose of the cloze procedure is to identify students knowledge and understanding , to determine the readers strategy and cues used to understand what they read, to encourage the student to read for meaning, to encourage students to think critically and analytically about text and content. Typically a self-contained appropriate grade level passage is selected, the first and last sentences are left intact and then words are deleted. In most subject areas words that carry meaning for that subject are the words selected for deletion. All the blanks are made of equal length so the student does not simply use the length of the blank and the length of the word as a matching cue. The student should read the entire passage before attempting to fill the blanks and they should try to fill each blank. Generally cloze procedures are not given a time limit, but the time it takes the student to complete the passage and fill in the blanks should be noted. In some cases a few choices that may be used to fill a blank are placed under the blank. This gives the student less choices at any given point in the passage.

In some cases this can be a great "bell work" type of assignment or a homework assignment. Bell work is given out as students enter the classroom and is intended as a short assignment for students to work on while the teacher takes roll and completes the typical class startup procedures. When given for homework, this type of assignment can be a nice review of material that was covered during class that day.

As part of many courses for teachers in the area of reading the cloze procedure is one that is presented to pre-teachers to practice. I have put one passage in another article so far that uses a cloze procedure and it is called "The Hydrogen and Oxygen Love Story". This was a passage designed for a science class that had just been given a lecture about the structure of water and how it can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen gases.