English Cloze Passage Analysis PART 1 - NSW Selective Test 2021
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To begin with, what is a cloze passage?
A cloze passage is a type of question in reading exams that help assess your comprehension and your ability to apply knowledge in different scenarios. A simple one that I am sure you have seen before is where they delete words in a passage and the student has to use context clues and sentence knowledge to fill in the answer. This means there are words or numbers removed from the passage and you have to know what is missing. It requires the student to understand context and vocabulary in order to identify the correct language or part of speech that belongs in the deleted passage.
The most basic form of this is usually evident in the more traditional exams even in primary school. So, this question that I have popped on the screen is taken from an ICAS exam and as you can see here, there is a word missing. The answers are from one of the four multiple-choice and you have to insert it in the missing area to see whether it is correct or not. The number of words deleted usually depends on reading ability. The more words removed, the more difficult it usually is. In this example here, it is only one word which makes it relatively simple especially as they are looking for something specific like grammar or sentence structure. This is also supported by the fact that this question is usually given to year 3/4 students (below).
However, the focus of this resource is to go through the best approaches for the more difficult type of cloze passage questions. In particular, I will go through the approach that we can see in the Reading portion of the 2021 Sample Selective exam paper that was released. For starters, we know it is more difficult compared to the one I showed earlier. As we can see multiple sentences have been removed and there is even another sentence which should not even be used.
This question also measures a few more elements compared to any of the questions they used to give in any of the previous questions given in the past. It now covers paragraph patterns, literal comprehension, relationships, specific phonic elements, process strategies, vocabulary, language structures and implied and inferred comprehension. Therefore, it has clearly become more complex but I can see why they now do these types of questions as they get more information from it compared to what they used to do. I won’t be going over how to answer the specific sample paper questions but I will go over how to answer these types of questions.
Here is the 3 step process in the approach you need to do:
Some people debate on what to do first whether it be looking at the sentences at the end of the text so you mentally know where you may place some of the missing lines. However, this is not the most effective way and is supported by the literature.
The first thing you actually want to do is to read the entire text first because, with all comprehension texts, you want to make sure that you know what they are saying and asking of you. If you try to skip to the answers immediately and then try to see where they place without reading the entire text first, chances are you will be placing them in the wrong spot. This is critical as based on the structure of this type of question if you put a wrong answer in the incorrect spot, that can have flow-on effects where you will get some of the other answers in the text wrong too.
The second step you want to do after reading the entire text is to have a look at the potential answers in the box below. Familiarise yourself with it. Something important to note here is that you do not want to be basing your answers on the potential answers in the box below and seeing where it fits in the text above. Instead, you want to do the opposite where you see where the missing line is in the text and determining which potential answer in the box below will fit. A little confusing, I know but hopefully the picture I have on-screen help clarify what I am trying to convey.
The third and last step you want to do is to go down the text starting from the top to bottom. Usually what happens is that I see some students start from the middle as they may have an inkling of the answer there, then they go to the last question and then the first question in the text. Try to resist doing that and instead go one by one in trying to find the best answer for each question. If you genuinely are unsure of what to put in that section then by all means skip it for the time being and come back to it. This is because if you are more confident in the remainder questions, there will be a smaller selection of choices available for the question you are struggling with and it will therefore increase your chances of getting it correct.
This 3-step approach is also supported by the literature, the most notable one being the one by Diane Thompson ‘The Use of the Cloze Procedure as a Strategy for Teaching Content and Vocabulary’. She writes that in order to most accurately answer cloze type questions, you would need to read the entire text a minimum of 3 entire times which will be the case if you follow the above approach.
Although re-reading sequentially is the best approach, less successful students who reread the text do it more randomly. Especially, when they had difficulty understanding it or when they were unsure of the accuracy of their answers. These were mainly illogical re-readings of parts of the text. This slowed their understanding as they did not make very much effort at making connections or drawing inferences other than rereading one part of the text several times without learning anything new beyond the first time they read it.
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