Sara Lassiter

Morgan Treon
READ 440 - 4/19/18

Author’s Abstract:
This study examines strategies for supporting vocabulary and content learning in 5 grade
9 Earth Science classes that are part of a SDAIE program (Specially Designed Academic
Instruction in English) in an urban California high school. Students received vocabulary and
content instruction during a unit on Earthquakes. One group of students performed rational cloze
(gap-filling) exercises as a postinstruction activity, while a second group performed reading
comprehension exercises. In immediate and delayed posttests, the 2 groups showed no
differences in receptive learning of vocabulary and content. However, in delayed posttests,
students in the rational cloze group performed better on paragraph summary writing using
content-area vocabulary and expressing content knowledge. Their superior performance may be
attributable to 2 factors: The rational cloze activity gave them opportunities for text rehearsal
(i.e., reading and understanding the passages while filling gaps) and the rational cloze passages
gave them discourse-level language models. In a follow-up questionnaire, students in the reading
comprehension group characterized their activity as equally useful to other instructional
activities. However, students in the rational cloze group characterized their activity as
distinctively more useful than all other instructional activities. Thus, rational cloze activities
appear to provide learners with useful scaffolding for vocabulary use and summary writing.
Summary of the Literature Review/ Background:
In schools, learning new vocabulary and new content are inexplicably linked, since
academic content is centered around vocabulary. This is especially true in science. With that,
acquiring new academic vocabulary tends to be difficult, since each discipline may have specific
definitions, and dictionaries are not enough to explain each separate meaning. Such words most
likely do not appear frequently in texts and can not be guessed from context. When students are
given background on a topic, reading comprehension generally improves, but the lack of
knowledge about subject-specific vocabulary can still hinder content learning.
A previous study involving a 6th-grade students’ reading of social studies texts showed
that pre-teaching of background knowledge did not facilitate the solving of vocabulary issues to
help reading comprehension (Stahl, Jacobson, Davis, 1989). When students are not comfortable
with content-specific vocabulary, it can negatively impact recall of details, understanding
relationships, and recall of order of events.

Research question/ Purpose

The purpose of this study was to look at two practice activities in addition to vocabulary
teaching: rational cloze and reading comprehension. The study asked which of the activities
improved receptive learning of vocabulary and productive use of technical vocabulary.

Research Design- Independent Variables

Five Earth Science classrooms at an inner city school of Central California were studied,
with 84 participants total. The same teacher taught the five, fifty minute classes about
earthquakes, and each student had a text book for use in class as well as at home. Three of the
classes were assigned to the rational cloze group, since there was a large number of special needs
students that were excluded from the study. Two classes were assigned to the reading
comprehension group. The lesson was taught over eight and a half classes, excluding testing
time.
The groups differed in the rational cloze exercises and the reading comprehension,
carried out in the teaching of the lesson. These were practice activities given to the respected
research class and functioned as the independent variable.
The rational cloze exercises consisted of a paragraph with 11 to 19 blanks, providing
solid lines for singular words and dotted lines for phrases.
The reading comprehension exercise included 6 to 12 questions regarding vocabulary and
content, and asked students to write answers in complete sentences.

Performance Measurement (Dependent Variables)

Four assessments were taken by all of the classes: vocab recall, paragraph summary,
true/false, and definition matching. Vocab recall required completing the spelling of 20 vocab
words, with 2 of the target word provided and blanks for each letter missing. In the paragraph
summary task, students were asked to write a paragraph with the five provided target words. The
true/false task provided twenty statements that tested the student’s receptive knowledge. Lastly,
the definition matching task had students connect given definitions with the corresponding vocab
word. Each test had the questions in each section scrambled in different orders.
There was an initial immediate post test, given 1 day after the lesson was completed,
followed by a delayed post test given 14 days after completion of the lesson.
A pre assessment was included to measure student’s prior knowledge, and a post test was
designed to receive feedback about the perceptions of the activities themselves.

Research Results
As mentioned in the purpose, the research study focused on three main questions of
effects of rational cloze and reading comprehension activities; receptive learning of technical
vocabulary in a content-area topic, as measured in vocabulary-recall and vocabulary
definition-matching tasks, on receptive learning of content measured in the True/False task, and
on productive use of technical vocab of content-area topic and expression of relationships of
concepts, as tested in a paragraph summary-writing task.
The study found that there was no statistically significant difference between the rational
cloze and reading comprehension groups for the first two questions. In the initial post-test
between the two groups for the third question, regarding productive use of technical vocab, there
was also no significant difference. In the delayed post test results showed that the rational cloze
group showed higher scores.

Implications of the Research

The higher scores of the rational cloze groupon the delayed post-test can be attributed to
several possibilities. First, the use of cloze passages has students practice with text rehersal and
reconstructing meaning. There is an extra requirement of reading comprehension with the cloze
passages that is not seen in the comprehension task. These finding show that students retain
information, and are able to utilize vocab with the cloze method.

Questions or Concerns
This research should be repeated in additional classrooms and schools to diversify the
sample based on ethnicity, social, and economic backgrounds. Additionally, the methods should
be randomized more, as often classes at the end of the day tend to be different in dynamics than
classes at the beginning due to energy levels, teacher fatigue, and other factors.

Citation:
Lee, S. H. (2009). Vocabulary and Content Learning in Grade 9 Earth Science: Effects of
Vocabulary Preteaching, Rational Cloze Task, and Reading Comprehension Task. ​The Catesol
Journal,​ ​21​(1), 75-102. Retrieved April 17, 2018.