Cloze Procedure Technique in Reading and Listening Comprehension

By Ahsan Sajjad

Introduction

Comprehension mean to understand some thing. Like some point or word’s .After the reading & understanding the point's. Than Explain the answer in our wording who understand easily .

Cloze mean’s to fill-in-the-blanks.

Cloze for Comprehension name of complete OR fill the missing word’s in the passage .

A father and son were having an argument. The father said sternly, “Spend more time on your studies! If youfail again, you’re geography!” Upon hearing his father’s mistake, the boy laughed uncontrollably andcorrected him, “You mean HISTORY. If I fail again, I’m history.” The father was greatly agitated and yelled,“Stop laughing and don’t change the subject!”

PASSAGE

CLOZE PROCEDURE TECHNIQUE

  Cloze procedure is a technique in which words are deleted from a passage according to a word-count formula or various other criteria. The passage is presented to students, who insert words as they read to complete and construct meaning from the text. This procedure can be used as a diagnostic reading assessment technique and listening comprehsion. Beside that, a cloze test (also cloze deletion test) is an exercise, test, or

CLOZE PROCEDURE TECHNIQUE assessment consisting of a portion of text with 

certain words removed, where the participant is asked to replace the missing words. Cloze tests require the ability to understand context and vocabularyvocabulary in order to identify the correct words or type of words that belong in the deleted passages of a text. This exercise is commonly administered for the assessment of native and second language learninglearning and instruction.

Using the Cloze Procedure to Assess Reading Comprehension

• The cloze procedure can be used with students at all levels of reading ability to assess reading comprehension or test vocabulary knowledge. It involves taking a passage of text that students have previously read, and deleting words from it. Students must supply the omitted words to complete the sentences. Completing these sentences requires critical thinking skills and allows teachers to gauge how well students are able to use semantic and syntax cues to construct meaning from the text. It can also be used to determine how well students have retained knowledge of content or vocabulary.

Steps Of Cloze Procedure Technique in Reading Comprehension

• Use the following three-phase teaching procedure as a basic framework to implement the cloze technique: First, Presentation and Preparation. Use rereading activities, such as developing a purpose for reading, to motivate the student and build background information. Provide short practice sessions. Work with the student and model how the exercises are completed. Select materials at the student’s independent reading level. Second, Preview and Completion. Have the student read the passage three times. During the first reading the student gains an overview of the material and fills in the blanks mentally. In the second reading, the student fills in all of the blanks. For the third reading, the student checks to see if the responses make sense. During the second and third readings, students may work in pairs or small groups. Third, is Follow-up.

• The most important step is the follow-up conference. Discuss with the students their choices, review other acceptable alternatives, and ask the students to explain why they chose a particular response. If needed, discuss specific context clues that are found around the blank and assist in word selection. As a final step, have students compare their responses with the original.

Using the Cloze Procedure to Assess Listening Comprehension

For one type of listening cloze, the students have a text with some words deleted – as in a regular cloze activity. However, rather than deleting every nth word, as in grammatical cloze, this activity will tend to target particular vocabulary. For example, as part of a secondary school unit on politics, the teacher might use a song such as ‘The Logical Song’ by Super tramp. All the adjectives could be deleted – radical, logical, liberal, etc. – and students asked to listen carefully to the song, a number of times, in order to fill in the blanks. In a variation, the text to which the students listen has gaps, represented by either silence or the word ‘buzz’. The students write down what word they think might go in the gap. This is best done by the teacher reading aloud, and being able to gauge when the students are ready to move on, rather than using a pre-recorded text.

Steps Of Cloze Procedure Technique in Listening Comprehension

• One device for focusing student attention on such “less important” forms is the modified cloze procedure (see step 2). For instance, if the students are having difficulty with a and the, the cloze procedure can be used to focus their attention on the difficulty: First,record a listening passage on a tape recorder. Second, prepare a written copy of the recorded passage, but with all instances of a and the deleted (It is useful to tell the students precisely how many of the articles are missing). Third, divide them into groups of three (optional). Fourth, play the recording as many times as they wish in order for them to fill-in the missing words. The last, after the sheets are exchanged and corrected, the students have—if they were not divided into groups of three—a copy of a complete text which may now be exploited for reading, or whatever.

The Strengths and The Weakness of Cloze Procedure Technique in Reading and Listening

• According to my analysis, reading and listening have strengths and weakness are almost the same when seen from the way of assessment. Here are the strengths and weakness of reading skills as well as the skill listening if using a cloze procedure technique. In the cloze test procedure often uses the assessment by using a multiple-choice cloze. In reading or listening skills are very good ways to use and most teachers are also using the multiple-choice cloze to improve the students’ skills in understanding the material.

The Strengths and The Weakness of Cloze Procedure Technique in Reading and Listening

• The advantage of the multiple-choice cloze over the standard cloze is that the task of comprehension is easier than that of production. Therefore, a multiple-choice cloze would be easier, and thus, students’ will obtain scores that are higher than on an open-ended form. Of course, in a norm-referenced situation, the increase at the level of the scores would not influence the ranking of the students, i.e., all testees will score higher on the multiple-choice form than they will on the open-ended form. In a criterion-referenced situation, however, where there exists a predetermined criterion for the students to meet,

The Strengths and The Weakness of Cloze Procedure Technique in Reading and Listening

• low scores would hurt those at the borderline. This shortcoming can be overcome by developing certain adjustment formulas to equate the scores obtained from multiple choice and open-ended forms. The disadvantage of multiple-choice cloze test is the difficulty of its development. To construct a multiple-choice cloze test, the open-ended form should be administered to a group of testers similar to the target group in order to elicit the distracters. Through this procedure, from among the wrong responses produced by the testers, the most frequent ones are selected to form the distracters for each blank. Of course, pretesting adds to the burden of the test developers. However, the ease of scoring, the extent of the objectivity, and the degree of practicality of the multiple-choice cloze tests make using such tests worthwhile.