English Education Models

Interactive Cloze Activity: Overview

     The interactive cloze activity that's demonstrated here is centered around a "clozed" poem, that is, a poem with certain words deleted and replaced with blank lines.

     Brainstorming possible replacements for the blanks is the students' first task in an interactive cloze activity.  As its name implies (interactive cloze), the brainstorming (and the tasks that follow) is done in small groups (or pairs, at a minimum).  At this stage in the interactive cloze activity, students are encouraged to be "free ranging" in their thinking; they're asked to generate several alternative replacements for each blank without making value judgments about a single best replacement.  In determining possible replacements, students will be paying attention to syntactic and semantic clues in the text and drawing on their prior knowledge, two "habits of mind" characteristic of good readers.

     After a period of brainstorming, students, still working in small groups (or in pairs), are asked to decide which of their possible replacements they prefer for each blank.  Students prepare to present their vision of the text to the class (possibly a "dramatic" presentation of their text) and to explain the reasons for their choices, providing evidence both from the text and from their prior knowledge and personal experience.  These explanations are essential because, in essence, they make available to others the students' processes of, or strategies for, making sense of text.  Showing students how readers work is a fundamental goal of the interactive cloze.

     After all student versions have been presented, the teacher presents the author's version of the poem and invites students to give their responses to the different versions (including which word choices they now prefer and why) and to speculate about the author's choices (why, for example, they think the author might have made his/her word choices).  Exploration is the goal at this stage - not leading students toward a meaning, an interpretation of what the text "is" about.