Teaching Comprehension Cloze feels like scaling Mount Everest. I can impart strategies and highlight contextual clues, but it seems hard for me to dish out pro tips and reassure the kiddos that, “if you remember this and spot a particular pattern, you’ll do fine.”
Necessity is the mother of invention. Okay, this proverb doesn’t quite apply in my case, but it was amazing how I dissected and deconstructed this component when time was not on my side. I scanned through passages and scrutinised my students’ mistakes. So far, I have managed to come up with the following:
- Can the blank be filled with a determiner (a, an, the)?
- Does the blank necessitate a plural marker -s?
- Does the blank require a comparative adjective or simply more or less?
Suddenly, the formidable art of teaching Compre Cloze has become more manageable (dare I say it?) and enjoyable.
