Provide practice cloze exercises before testing your students. For younger students, provide oral cloze activities by omitting predictable words from a story or poem that you read aloud. Students must listen carefully and insert logical words to play the game. After oral practice, students may be ready for a written cloze procedure.
Create a written cloze procedure to diagnose students' current reading skills. Pick a reading passage appropriate for the age and maturity of your students. Regina Chatel explains that instructors may delete any word at regular intervals. A cloze procedure that deletes every tenth word will be less difficult than one omitting every fifth word. If you delete articles (a, an, the) or prepositions (e.g., in, to, of), the test will be less difficult than a cloze procedure deleting verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Instructional Strategies Online cautions instructors to create blanks of identical length to prevent unintentional clues to word length.
Determine reading levels. Without penalizing for spelling, count each word correct if identical with the original wording or if the word qualifies as a reasonable synonym. Students scoring 90% or above have read the passage at an independent level, a fluent level where students need no help from the instructor. Those scoring lower at an instructional level (70% to 89%) can improve their reading with instructional support. At the frustration level (below 70%), students lack essential decoding and comprehension skills for that particular reading passage.
Model the cloze technique for reading instruction. Demonstrate to students how you use prior knowledge of a subject to predict word choice in a reading passage. By describing your thought processes, you can help students with reading comprehension.
Design cloze activities for silent reading instruction. Readers learn to search for context clues as they predict the missing words. In a modified cloze procedure, the instructor could list (and jumble) the missing words on the board. Whatever the approach, the cloze technique can actively engage students in the process of reading comprehension.