What is a cloze test used for?
Cloze tests are used to assess your child’s vocabulary, reading comprehension skills, spelling and grammar knowledge. The questions depend on understanding the meaning of words and putting them into context. A wide vocabulary and sound understanding of grammar will help your child to approach these questions with confidence.
Why is it called a cloze test?
The name ‘cloze’ comes from the word ‘closure’, which is an idea in Gestalt psychology. This psychological school was popular in the early and mid-20th century. Cloze exercises were first described in 1953 by W. L. Taylor.
Gestalt psychologists believed that people see complete patterns instead of individual parts. The ‘law of closure’ states that people see incomplete objects such as shapes, pictures, letters, words or sentences as complete, as our perception fills in any gaps.
How to solve cloze exercises
Solve ‘choose the word’ questions
Following these steps will help children to identify the word they need to complete the passage.
- Read the sentence through: what’s going on in the sentence? Even if a word is missing, you’ll be able to get a good sense of what the sentence is about.
- Identify the word class of the missing word. Is it a verb, adjective, noun or adverb? You can rule out word options that are not part of this word class.
- Look at the answer choices and choose the word that best fits in the sentence.
- Add the word to the sentence. Read the whole sentence through to double-check that the sentence makes sense.
Solve ‘complete the sentence’ questions
The steps for solving ‘complete the sentence’ style questions are similar to those for solving ‘choose the word’ questions, but the method differs slightly.
- Read the sentence and think about what is happening in it. Look at the other words in the sentence. Do they give you any clues about what the incomplete word is?
- Confirm how many letters are missing from the word.
- Identify and add the missing letters to the incomplete word. Try sounding out the incomplete word. Does it sound like a word you already know?
- Check: Have you made a correctly spelled word? Does the whole sentence make sense?
Which exams use cloze tests?
Cloze questions appear on verbal reasoning and some English papers for grammar school entrance exams.
Cloze tests are also used as part of some independent school entrance assessments. They appear on the ISEB Common Pre-Test English paper, within the grammar section.
As well as summative exams, some schools use cloze tests in the classroom as a formative assessment of children’s English language progress.
Can you revise for cloze tests?
Most children will benefit from steady practice during the year leading up to the 11 plus to become familiar and confident with the format of cloze questions. Cramming in preparation just before the exam can put students under too much pressure.
When we encounter a new question style for the first time, we have to expend a certain amount of cognitive energy to understand what is being asked for. It’s best not to leave this discovery process until the actual exams, and instead give your child the chance to practise and build confidence well in advance.
Aside from practising cloze exercises themselves, another important way to prepare is by reading widely for fun. Fiction and non-fiction books from a range of genres and time periods are an excellent resource to build your child’s vocabulary knowledge and grammatical understanding.
Practice guided reading, where you ask your child questions about what they have read – this will help them to hone their reading comprehension technique too. All of these are key skills which they will need to draw upon to answer cloze questions successfully.
