Cloze procedure

Cloze procedure is where a teacher takes a text, erases some words, and essentially has students fill in the blanks. It is sort of like a mad lib, but a bit more mature and helpful to reading and writing strategies. It also helps students to utilize a wide range of their vernacular.


(the following taken from here)
To prepare materials for Cloze exercises, any of the following techniques may be used:

Select a self-contained passage of a length appropriate for the grade level of the students being assessed. Use materials easily read by the students.
Leave the first and last sentences and all punctuation intact.
Carefully select the words for omission using a word-count formula, such as every fifth word or other criteria. To assess students' knowledge of the topic or their abilities to use semantic cues, delete content words which carry meaning, such as nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. To assess students' use of syntactic cues, delete some conjunctions, prepositions and auxiliary words.
When preparing the final draft of the passage, make all blanks of equal length to avoid including visual clues about the lengths of omitted words.
Have the students read the entire passage before they fill in the blanks.
Encourage the students to fill each blank if possible.
Although there should be no time limit for this exercise, the time necessary for completion should be noted.
Suggest that students reread the completed passage.