Improve the reading comprehension and vocabulary of your ESL students with this easy to use Cloze Test creator (the technical name for a piece of text with gaps in that need to be completed.)
Simply go to the site and paste the words you’d like to use into the text box provided on the left (a good source of text would be from the stories from a site we looked at in a previous post.)
Using the options to the right you can then choose the kind of words you’d like to appear as gaps within the text. The choices are:
every ( ) words – if you write 3, then there will be a gap every three words
articles
prepositions
link words
auxiliaries
wh- words
quantifiers
modals
let me choose
If you select the final option you have to individually highlight the words you wish to appear as a gap and then click the ‘+’ box in the centre of the screen.
Note that you can only select one of the these options at a time.
You then have further options of:
Text Only
This creates a test which can then be copied into a wordprocessing application for printing or further editing.
Interactive
Produces a cloze test which can be completed onscreen by typing the answers into the gaps. If you type in the correct word, it’s added as part of the text and the gap disappears. If you get it wrong, then the box is highlighted in red. A score is kept of progress.
Clues/No Clues
If you select ‘Clues’ a list of the words required to complete the text is given above the text as below:
In conclusion, this is a great free tool. There are a couple of issues to bear in mind though:
In my experience the interactive version does not work 100% accurately – sometimes you type in the right answer and it won’t accept it as being correct.
There is no option to save the interactive tests or distribute them via email or other methods.
I have also spotted a mistake when I selected ‘prepositions’ and among the clues the word ‘but’ was included. ‘But’ can be a preposition when followed by a noun, e.g. nothing but trouble, but this wasn’t the case in this particular text, it was functioning as a conjunction.
Having said this, I feel the positives outweigh the negatives and it is a very useful tool to use in reading comprehension activities particularly when using the paperbased version which can be customized as you wish.