Using Cloze Activities in the ESL and ELL Classroom

Whether you’re testing reading comprehension, helping students learn new vocabulary words, or improving listening skills, cloze activities may help. These fill-in-the-blank passages work for students at multiple levels. The reading level of the passage and the difficulty of the vocabulary words you choose help determine the difficulty of the activity.

What are Cloze Activities?

Cloze actvities are activities where students fill in the blanks in a short reading passage. To test their comprehension and understanding of a text, students must fill in the missing words. Cloze activities can be created using virtually any text, including poems, songs, and non-fiction pieces. Some cloze activities only have a few blanks, while more difficult cloze activities may have many blanks. In fact, a teacher can create multiple cloze activities from the same text. For example, a teacher may remove 5-6 words from the text on one worksheet, and then give students the same text with 10-12 words removed.

Using Cloze Activities in the ESL and ELL Classroom