Reading and Writing with Children

Cloze exercises

Cloze exercises are passages with certain words deleted. They are fill‐in‐the‐blank exercises that you create for a student. They are useful because cloze exercises allow a student to focus on a particular difficulty in his or her reading and writing. However, because teachers regularly use cloze exercises in the classroom, some students may not want to do them with a tutor. If you plan on making a cloze exercise with one of your students, make sure that he or she wants to do a cloze exercise with you.

How to make a cloze exercise for a student

Use a text that interests the student, for example a journal entry, a favourite song or a story written through the language experience approach. Delete some of the words (or some parts of words) in the passage. Choose words (or parts of words) that the student often has difficulty with. Don’t delete too many words - leave enough words to supply a context. You may need to list the deleted words at the bottom of the page

You can design a cloze exercise to help one of your students practise almost any aspect of language. For example, you could focus on:

spelling – choose several important or difficult words in a passage. Delete all the letters in these words except the initial letters.
consonant sounds – remove the initial consonants from some words in the passage. prediction – delete some of the content words. List the deleted words at the bottom of the page. For more advanced students, don’t supply the deleted words on the page. Instead, ask them to come up with words that make sense according to the context.
suffixes (word endings) – remove suffixes from several words in the passage.
letter order – choose words that are difficult for your students. Delete these words and provide several similar words for them to choose from (for example, boot/boat, or there/their). This exercise also encourages students to focus on meaning.