Teaching Reading Comprehension to the Advanced

ESL Student using the Cloze Procedure

Ted Plaister
University of Hawaii

Before considering ways and means of using the cloze procedure for
reading instruction with ESL students, it would be well to examine
what it is the reader brings to the reading act. First of all, there is
the reader’s knowledge of the language he is reading (his competence);
second, there is his knowledge of the culture about which he is reading;
third, there is his theory of reading (by this is meant those reading
strategies which he employs when he reads); fourth, there is his previous
success with reading; fifth, there is his intelligence; sixth, there is his
motivation to want to read whatever it is he is reading; seventh, there
is his proficiency as a reader of his native language; and, in addition,
there is a whole host of minor variables such as age -

which, while -

important, need not -overly concern us here.

A moment’s reflection should tell us where the native reader (NR)
and the non-native reader (NNR) are most likely to differ in their
reading proficiency. Among the most obvious differences between the
two is the reader’s knowledge of the language (i.e., how well does he
know the language he is reading) and his knowledge of the culture he
is reading about. Taking knowledge of the culture first, we will find
that this may or may not be an important consideration in reading
success for the NNR. If the reader restricts his reading to textbook
materials in subjects such as mathematics, geography, or the natural
sciences, the cultural factor is not of sufficient magnitude to cause
concern. For these kinds of materials, it is only on rare occasions
that knowledge of the culture will constitute a stumbling block to
reading comprehension. In other kinds of reading, however, the cultural
factor does loom fairly large in the total comprehension picture. In
university situations (except in certain specialized courses) most of the
reading done by NNRs is fairly acultural; thus, this feature may be
set aside as constituting a major reading problem except for a special
few.
The reader’s knowledge of the language, however, is quite a different
matter. This knowledge can be divided into two parts: the syntax
and the lexicon. There is, of course, another cue system: the graphic
one which Goodman (1970) calls the graphophonic system. In this
particular cue system the reader responds to the graphic sequences
and may utilize the correspondences between the graphic and phono-
logical systems of his particular dialect. These are not phoneme-
grapheme correspondences, in that they operate on the morpho-
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phonemic level and not on the phoneme-grapheme level, that is, spelling
patterns relate to sound sequences. This cue system is reasonably
well-known by university-level NNRs although some errors will occur
from time to time on the part of those who have not mastered the rules.
However, these particular mis-readings if that is what one should -

call them - need not necessarily constitute an obstacle to comprehen-

sion. After all, if one is reading and pronouncing sub-vocally, the
particular prounciation used is of little consequence to an understanding
of the message. Further, really fast readers are going quite beyond
the normal speed of speech which is approximately 150 words per
minute, so in a very real sense there is no pronouncing going on.
However, the author recently did a speeded pronunciatio~n exercise
with himself while reading a fairly simple selection from TIME and
found that he could read while pronouncing sub-vocally at a rate of
roughly 570 words per minute. This simple experiment demonstrates
clearly that a reader can &dquo;pronounce&dquo; sub-vocally much faster than
if he were to actually move his articulators. Increased speed (but
not necessarily of the highly advertised Evelyn Woods variety) can
come as a result of reaching beyond the sub-vocalization stage. In
other words, printed language can be processed directly from the eye
to the brain without a detour via the mouth.

It is still not certain which constitutes the bigger barrier to reading

comprehension for the NNR - the syntax or the lexicon. Perhaps
it is a six-of-one and half-a-dozen-of-the-other kind of a proposition.
Of course, the level of complexity of the syntax or lexicon is an im-
portant factor. If a piece of prose has everything but the contentives
masked, the reader can get the gist of the meaning. However, if the
reverse is done, the result is usually gibberish, although there is some
kind of meaning coming through because there is no question that
syntactic signals do carry meaning. All of this demonstrates the
redundancy in the signals of written prose.* But given a certain amount
of redundancy, the reader still needs some of both-lexicon and
syntax - to ascertain the real meaning of a message. All writing
systems are redundant, of course, and if they were not, reading hand-
writing, for example, would be an almost impossible task. Further,
redundancy is present at all levels in the writing system: the individual
letters, their combinations into words, and the linking together of words
to form phrases, clauses, sentences, etc.

The NNR is often

a linguistically insecure reader. He is afraid of
missing something he reads, and
as as a consequence of this fear, feels
that he has to devour each and every little squiggle on the page in

*It is not completely clear which form of language (speech or writing) can tolerate
the greatest amount of &dquo;noise,&dquo; in the information sciences sense, but writing can
probably be distorted to a greater degree than speech and still be understood.

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order to get the author’s mean~ing.~’ Because so many of our NNRs
have been taught English by means of a grammar-translation method,
they have come to place great reliance upon their bilingual dictionaries
to bail them out when they do not understand what they are reading.
This grammar-translation approach to language teaching places an
undue importance upon each and every word. Further, because these
students have not received training in some of the common study skills
that most of us have learned at one time or another, they reach
immediately for their dictionary when they come to a word in their
reading which they do not understand. Every reader has to look up
words on occasion, but in most cases the context defines the meaning
of new words for the skilled reader. In fact, very often the reader
does not need to know the exact meaning of a particular word -
something which the NNR must learn. For example, if one is reading
about the use of flowers for decoration and a particular passage says
something about the different kinds of flowers which are used for leis
in Hawaii, there might follow a list of ten or fifteen flowers which are
commonly used. It is a reasonable supposition that most readers will
not recognize the names of at least half of the flowers used. The
efficient reader will gloss over this lack of specific information and
continue reading for more important ideas unless, of course, knowing
the names of she individual flowers is somehow important. All too
often in reading situations such as the one described, the NNR will
stop, reach for his dictionary and look up every item on such a list.
This points to his inability to ignore irrelevant information and is one
source of inefficient reading, something which he cannot afford if he
is to keep abreast of his college reading assignments.
How can the ESL/EFL teacher encourage his students to make
what amounts to educated guesses in their reading? The students
very often know a great deal of English, but they are not using what
they know because either they are unaware that they do know a great
deal or they are simply afraid of missing something unless they con-
centrate on every single word in a line of print. What is a way to
convince students that this is not necessary? What can the teacher
do to stop students from reaching for their dictionaries, thereby for-.
getting the context of what they are reading while exercising their
thumbs? How can language teachers get students to utilize their
knowledge of language to make guesses at meaning without recourse
to a dictionary? The use of the cloze procedure as a teaching device
is one means by which this can be accomplished, at least in part.

*The same is true in the case of listening comprehension. The non-native listener
does not know what to ignore in listening situations, and often has a sense of
panic when he has to listen to something of vital concern to him - such as a
lecture. If the usual lecturer speaks at a rate of approximately 150 words per
minute and he lectures for 50 minutes, the listener has something like 7,500
words on which to make decisions. How many of these approximately 7,500
words should the listener ignore?

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 Goodman (1967) has called reading a psycholinguistic guessing game.
He says, &dquo;Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of
available minimal language cues selected from perceptual input on
the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial information is
processed, tentative decisions are made, to be confirmed, rejected or
refined as reading progresses.&dquo; Further, &dquo;Efficient reading does not
result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but
from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to
produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate
that which has not been seen, of course, is vital to reading, just as the
ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital to listening.&dquo;
If it is good educational practice to promote &dquo;psycholinguistic
among readers, then use of the cloze procedure can be an
guessing&dquo;
effective means to achieve this in that the cloze procedure forces the
reader to guess. Further, the teacher can guide his students to make
reasonable guesses based upon what thy know about the language.
rather than guesses based merely on chance.
The cloze procedure, which was introduced by Taylor in 1953, is a
technique involving the deletion of every nth word (in standard
practice, every fifth word word is deleted and replaced by a standard-
sized blank) of a reading passage. The students are then asked to
supply the missing words. The word cloze itself comes from closure,
a term from Gestalt psychology, which describes the human tendency
to complete a familiar but no-t-quite-finished pattern. An example is
the ability &dquo;to see&dquo; a broken circle as a completed one by mentally
closing the gaps. A linguistic example would be: &dquo;Chickens cackle:
...............quack.&dquo; The use of the cloze procedure to grade reading
materials by difficulty level is in fairly common use. Its use has also
been well-established as a testing device for use with both native and
non-native speakers of English. (See Oller and Conrad (1971) and
Oller (1972)). On the other hand, -l.i~ttle has been done using the cloze
procedure as a teaching device. The most comprehensive bibliography
published to date is the IRA publication, The Cloze Procedure as a
Teaching Technique. However, a careful reading of this annotated
bibliography is not productive in terms of discovering what might be
useful in a teaching situation other than to note that group discussion
appears to be a fruitful avenue. Bortnick and Lopardo (1973) point
out that the cloze procedure is almost unknown in classrooms today.
They are referring to classrooms where English is the native language
of the students. In English as a second or foreign language classrooms,
the situation is probably worse.
In applying the cloze procedure to the teaching of reading compre-
hension, it is important that the teacher minimize the testing aspects
and maximize the teaching ones. As mentioned above, in standard
cloze tests, a uniform-sized blank is used for each deleted word so
as not to give any indication of what the deleted word is. In the
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teaching situation, though, it is desirable to increase the amount of
information available to the student, so as to increase the student’s
chances of guessing correctly. One way to do this is to use a dash
for each letter of a deleted word instead of a standard-sized blank.
Still more information can be given to the student by supplying the
initial consonant letter of all words which begin with a consonant.
Initial consonant letters carry a lot of &dquo;information&dquo; so it makes sense
to supply them to the reader. For words beginning with a vowel,
this step is not necessary because the student’s choices for the initial
letter have automatically been reduced to one in five (a, e, i, o, u). For
reference purposes, every line of text which will be used in class is
numbered. One can number the individual blanks, but this tends to
clutter the page of print. Following standard practice with cloze-type
materials, the first sentence of text is given in its entirety as a lead-in
to supply some context as a basis for starting. A sample follows:

In the year 787 began a series of events which were to have a

great effect upon the history of the English language.

(1) For it was in t---year, according to the r------
(2) that have come down t - us, that the Scandinavians m---
(3) their first attack on t English coast.*
- -

Two general teaching approaches with cloze materials are suggested.

The first one is where the teacher works with the class as a whole.
Materials are prepared in the format suggested above and distributed
to the class. The teacher then leads the class .through the text line-
by-line calling up individuals to recite. Leading students through a
reading text in a, foreign language line-by-line has been going on for
years in second and foreign language classes and can be a very tedious
and boring procedure. However, the game element in the cloze pro-
cedure precludes this, at least in the author’s experience. The teacher
urges the students to read past blanks they can’t complete in order
to pick up information which will, in many instances, enable them to
fill blanks they once found incomprehensible. The teacher can prove
to the students that they know a great deal about a given blank even
though they cannot specify (at any given moment) the word which
has been deleted. For example, the teacher can draw out of the students
that a particular word must be a noun because of the context in which
it is imbedded. In addition, the teacher can point out that a particular
noun is the plural form, so tat the students can then fill in the letter .s
at the end. Students who are speakers of languages with little or no
inflection (Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin, etc.) have a great deal of
difficulty mastering the noun and verb endings in English. Even
students who have been studying English for a number of years will,
when they produce English in either written or spoken form, fail to
*David P. Harris, Reading Improvement Exercises for Students of English as a
Second Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), p. 115.

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use the appropriate endings. What using the cloze procedure ac-
complishes, though, is to force the students to use the correct endings.
Whether there will be positive transfer to speech and writing from
this kind of training, only a long and carefully controlled experimental
program will divulge.
In eliciting missing words, the teacher should readily accept
synonyms, i.e., meaning equivalents, as a first step towards identifying
a particular deletion. In fact the teacher should encourage the guessing
of meaning and accepting synonyms from the students is one way of
doing this. The teacher will find himself telling a particular student
that he has the right meaning for a missing word, but .tha,t it is not
the word the author selected. This can lead to a discussion of word
choice, and consequently style.
The second method of teaching is one using groups. In this method,
the teacher divides the class into groups of appropriate size and the
students work as teams with the teacher moving among the groups
offering help as needed. The writer has often started out on a passage
working with the whole class. After a paragraph or two has been
worked through, the class is then divided up for group work. Most
groups work at about the same pace, so that the teacher may wish to
stop group work from time to time and discuss a common problem.
As with all group work, the teacher has the responsibility of ensuring
that all members of a particular group are participating fully.
In addition to the advantages of using the cloze procedure which
have already been mentioned, there are several others. First of all,
all vocabulary is presented in context. There is no working with
words in isolation. Words which are new to the readers are en-
countered in context and explained in context. Second, the grammatical
form of deleted words is studied in context. Thus, the students are
learning something about the syntax of English as they work through
cloze passages. Third, the use of synonyms - as mentioned above -
in encouraged. Practically every word in English has its synonym(s)
and the synonyms for a particular deletion are always given in context.
Fourth, set phrases such as as a matter of fact are presented in context
and are execellent material for discussion. Phrases such as these are
probably read by skilled readers as one unit or only partially read
because of the predictable nature of the items in the phrase. When the
skilled reader encounters as a matter in the proper context, he knows
what will follow without thinking. The NNR can learn to anticipate
just as well as the NR if he is given enough practice. Fifth, cloze
procedure reading provides a broad sample of language for the student
to work with. Students are led to make decisions concerning vocabulary
and syntax from a more-or-less representative sample of the language.
All aspects of language must be coped with in reading and the cloze

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procedure affords the student practice in this. Teachers may want to
experiment with selective deletions, i.e., deleting specific items for a
particular purpose. However, following standard every 5th word de-
letion techniques probably ensures a better random sample for the
student to practice on. Sixth, working with the cloze procedure also
gives the students an opportunity to learn the rhetorical devices and
signals of English. The sequence signals such as consequently, there-
fore, etc. will automatically come up for discussion and explanation.
Seventh, especially for those NNRs who need practice in speaking and
listening comprehension, use of the cloze procedure fosters discussion
with the added advantage that the discussion is not in any way con-
trived. In other words, use of the cloze procedure promotes talk
among students and the teacher.
Still another advantage of the cloze procedure is that attention is
focused on spelling - every blank must be filled for a given word.
The tstudeat is forced to use, for example, double letters in those
words which are spelled with them. If he uses a single letter, he will
have an empty blank which automatically tells him that something
is wrong. (Teachers should be wary, however, of words like color
because students who come from areas where this is spelled colour will
become confused by the lack of blank.) In addition to the above, the
cloze procedure can be used with large classes by means of the group
approach. Comprehension is also easy to test simply by using the
cloze procedure on the passage once it has been studied. The cloze
procedure has yet another advantage in that it can be used at any
level of instruction. The teacher might wish to simplify the procedure
in the beginning stages by deleting every 8th word, for example,
rather than every 5,th thereby giving more context to the student.
And finally, the cloze procedure is a technique which the teacher
who is not a’ native speaker of English can use with confidence. It
is simple to prepare materials using the cloze method and the non-
native speaking teacher should find this a boon.
In summary, the cloze procedure has proven to be a useful tool for
use in ESL/EFL classes in that it is a means of engaging students
in language learning activities where all aspects of the language are
studied in a total context. In addition, there is a strong game element
to the cloze technique which appeals to students and teacher alike.
Finally, the cloze procedure can be a powerful co~nfidence builder
for the NNR in his efforts to become a more proficient reader.

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 References

Bortnick, Robert and Genevieve S. Lopardo. 1973. An instructional

application of the cloze procedure. Journal of Reading 16:4
296-300.
Goodman, Kenneth S. 1967. Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing
game. Journal of the Reading Specialist 4, 126-135.
Goodman, Kenneth S. and Olive Niles. 1970. Reading: Process and
programme. Part 1. Champaign, Ill: National Council of
Teachers of English.

Jongsma, Eugene. 1971. The cloze procedure as a teaching technique.

ERIC/CRIER and the International Reading Association Informa-
tion Series: Where do we go? Newark, Delaware: The Inter-
national Reading Association.
Oller, John W. Jr. 1972. Scoring methods and difficulty levels for
cloze tests of proficiency in English as a second language. Modem
Language Journal: 56:3. 151-158.
Oller, John W. Jr. and Christine A. Conrad. 1971. Cloze technique
and ESL proficiency. Language Learning 21.2. 183-195.
Smith, Frank. 1971. Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic
analysis of reading and learning to read. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winstan, Inc.

Taylor, Wilson S. Cloze procedure: A new tool for measuring read-

ability. Journalism Quarterly, 30 (Fall 1953). 415-433.

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