Osaka English Library

Marshall R. Childs / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

Fluent English flows like a mountain brook, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes noisy, sometimes quiet. In order to talk like that--or even to understand the flow of English--you have to feel it rather than analyze it. If you have a whole-body feeling for the sequences and flows, you can do it. If you do not have a feeling for it, you can try to apply step-by-step rules, but you will always be frustrated by your failings rather than thrilled by your successes.

Students who take my reading and vocabulary class do so because their English is not yet good enough to allow them to attend regular college lectures. They lack a feeling for the flows and hesitations of English. Yet they are close enough that if they could just join the flow they would experience rapid progress.

Some of us in the teachers’ room are getting interested in cloze exercises as means of gaining a feeling for the overall flow of English. A cloze exercise is a text in which some of the words are blanked out--maybe every seventh or eighth word--and students have to guess the missing words.

Due to the natural redundancy of language, most of the words are predictable if you have a sense of the flow of English. Some blanks are precisely predictable--only one word will fit--and some obviously could be filled by several words, so you have to pick the word that best fits the mood and message of the passage.

Here is a cloze passage that I have used as a college entrance test. A native speaker of English can fill in all 25 blanks quickly, but English learners have different degrees of success.

Happy-face marathoner

On Sept. 24, 2000, Naoko Takahashi slept late. Then, listening to J Pop singer Hitomi on her earphones "to feel upbeat and energized" and wearing sunglasses, she faced the starting line of the Olympic marathon in Sydney.

It was a warm _________ in Sydney, too warm for a fast _________. The course was not flat; instead _________ were many ups and downs. The world's _________ runners were in the race, among them Lidia Simon Romania.

At first, Takahashi and the two other Japanese _________ stayed behind the leaders. Takahashi ran with _________ usual style. Her left foot pointed outward _________ her right hand seemed to wave to ______ people who were watching.

After 17 kilometers, Takahashi _________ to run faster. Only Simon _________ stay with her. Takahashi and Simon ran _________ by side until the 35-kilometer mark. _________'s face was relaxed. She said later that _________ felt really happy to run together _________ Simon. Simon, who had trouble running so ______, did not look relaxed.

Around the 35-______ mark there were some really difficult hills. At _________ point, Takahashi removed her sunglasses and began to _________ even faster. She said later that taking _________ her sunglasses made the world look different. In _________ new world, she ran away from Simon. Soon _________ was 30 seconds ahead. Then Takahashi _________ by herself, enjoying the warm day and _________ people along the course. She won the _________ with a big smile on her face.

The above is a typical cloze passage. The first few lines, with no words blanked out, set the scene. Then words are omitted according to a regular pattern. Here I blanked out every eighth word except when doing so would present unusual difficulty--in which case I blanked out a nearby word. Applying judgment instead of mechanically following the count makes this a "tailored cloze" in the words of cloze expert J.D. Brown, professor of the University of Hawaii.

In order to fill in a word, you need to sense its appropriateness. If you were a computer you would decide the following: what part of speech it must be, what its function is in the sentence and what must be its mode, voice, tense, case, number, gender and so on. If you are a human being, you simply choose words that sound right and carry the story forward. The cloze procedure was invented in 1953 by W.L. Taylor, former professor at the University of Illinois, who thought of it as a technique for measuring the degree of difficulty of reading passages. Taylor said that the reader must achieve closure in order to fill in the blanks. The term "close" was ambiguous in both sound and meaning, but "cloze" preserved the "z" sound and was unmistakable.

As a holistic measure of the readability of passages, cloze works fairly well, but the greater use by far has been to measure the skill of the reader. Ah, but what skill is that, exactly? After all, it is not quite clear exactly what aspects of language ability cloze exercises tap.

Grammar? Vocabulary? Sentence-level patterns? Patterns above the sentence level? My answer is "all of the above."

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Cloze fit for teaching

Cloze passages need not be limited to testing. They can also be used for teaching overall language ability. After all, when a reader approaches a missing word, he or she becomes a participant in constructing the passage. This requires getting into the swing of a passage well enough to compose it jointly with the author. The passage serves as a scaffold for the learner to co-construct meaning.

In my classes, I have found that I should use very simple writing, and limit the length of passages to about 15 unknown words (the passage about Takahashi, above, has 25 blanks, which is too long for use in class). I have made cloze exercises from two Oxford Bookworms graded readers, Pocahontas, a historical book that uses a vocabulary of 400 words, and Anne of Green Gables, with a vocabulary of 700 words.

Some blanks require an exact word, such as "the," "to" or "is," in order to fit the sentence. But some blanks can be filled by a variety of words and the variety is up to students. This is the fun part. A recent episode of Pocahontas featured the title character's trip to London in 1616. Part of the passage said:

London was very noisy and __________. Pocahontas was interested in everything. She went ___________ shops, looked at books, and tried on ___________.

That middle blank seems to need "to" or "into." But, sensing the freedom of the first and last blanks, students enjoy thinking up words to describe London and the things Pocahontas tried on (some of which, giggling, they refused to tell me). I encourage students to work in groups, and to read the passage out loud as they work. I walk around hollering: "More noise! There's not enough noise in here!" After about five minutes, I read the passage out loud, pausing for students to suggest words.

What students get out of this is not new vocabulary, of course--they get that in other ways--but they get a sense of the long rhythms and syntactical patterns of English, without any mention of grammatical rules. They get a sense of how to rely on punctuation both for understanding and for reading aloud. And they notice things like the treatment of quotations and indirect speech.

My students agree that it would be very boring to begin every speech in a dialogue with "Pocahontas said" or "John Smith said." They are developing sympathy for a literary style that breaks speeches up, inserting stage directions like "he said" and "she said" with a certain rhythm. An example is:

"Hurt?" Pocahontas _________. "Is John Smith hurt?"

"Yes," said the man. "_________ was an explosion."

Breaking up a character's speech with interpolations like "she said" or "said he" seems to be something my students had not noticed before, but take pleasure in knowing. This is just an example, but there are many stylistic conventions and tricks that they can pick up by being cocreators of a cloze text.

As I have said before, language resides in the mind's ear, and our job is to help students find it there. Cloze passages help serve the purpose.

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Send e-mail to childs@tuj.ac.jp. The column will return on March 16. Childs, Ed.D., teaches TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) and other subjects at Temple University, Japan Campus. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/language/20070216TDY14004.htm

(Feb. 16, 2007)