Clozes, also know as “gap-fills,” are good tools for assessing vocabulary and comprehension and for helping students learn about context clues.
Most clozes you find on the web, I think, are fairly useless because they create the clozes using some kind of formula instead of omitting words strategically. Having students create clozes, and then having their classmates complete them, maximize their learning benefit. I’ve written a longer explanation of how I use them at Use “LearnClick” For An Excellent Metacognitive Lesson.
Here are my choices for The Best Tools For Creating Clozes (Gap-Fills):
I like LearnClick a lot. You can read more here how I use it (unfortunately, it’s begun to charge a a subscription fee for use).
Smile is a free web tool from Michigan State University, and allow teachers (and students) to easily create clozes, drag-and-drop exercises, and sequencing activities. They also allow you to use audio and video with the activities, and will host them as well.
One simple way to make clozes that you print out is just to copy and paste text in a Word document and strategically delete the words you want people to fill-in.
Life Beyond Gap-fill? is from Richmond Share.
Re-imagining the grammar classics: The personalized gap fill is from Teach Them English.
Student Instructions For How They Can Create A Cloze (Gap-Fill)
Fill in the Blank / Cloze Sentence Worksheets is from The Teacher’s Corner.
Create a Cloze Test
I saw an interesting version of a cloze/gap-fill that had students choose the correct multi-word phrases instead of the usual one word answers. I hadn’t though of that “twist” before…
Cloze Test Activity, Blog de Cristina’s Style is from…Blog de Cristina.
Gap Fill Gamble is from The British Council.
Sandy Millin has written an extensive post about sessions she attended at the annual IATEFL conference. It’s all interesting, but the last one on clozes/gap-fills is really worth reading.
Cloze it is a Google Docs add-on that lets you easily create clozes.
Create “Cloze Reading” Activities with Google Docs Dropdown Chips is from Eric Curtis.
VocabBoost lets you easily create clozes.
Lesson Ninja is a new tool for ELL teachers where you can – for a little more than five dollars each month – easily create exercises like clozes.
Additional suggestions are welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
You might also want to explore the over 900 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.
Thanks for once again mentioning http://www.learnclick.com. At learnclick.com you can also create drag-and-drop exercises (just choose “Drag & Drop” as the mode). You can also get statistics on how well students performed (I don’t think anybody else provides this feature). I want learnclick.com to be the best cloze test creation tool on the web, so if you have suggestions on how it can be improved, please let me know. BTW, soon you will also be able to create multiple choice quizzes on learnclick.com
Well, Im trying to find a programme, where i can create my own gapfills, and then read and learn with the diocument and all the gafilling, a little bit like spaced repetition flashcard apps. its not possible in powerpopint the proper way.(i tried it)
Is it sth. i can achieve in your app? i d buy it.
Thanks,
Do you know of any tools for creating click n’ drag labeling activities; that is, a student clicks on a word and drags it to some part of a picture?
Sorry, not off the top of my head. But you might want to check out my Best list on using Photos in the classrooom
You can do this by using goconqr.com. The only disadvantage is that you cannot change the language from Spanish to English in the instructions. Despite this, I create plenty of activities for my English blog
LOVE YOUR BLOG!! SO MUCH GREAT INFO, NOT JUST BORING BLAH, BLAH, BLAH…BUT STUFF I CAN ACTUALLY USE!
If you Google “clickschool cloze” then you’ll find another generator. It’s pretty basic though it’s easy to use and great to use with interactive whiteboards. One downside is that you need Flash.
Thanks for a nice article. I saw this post and wanted to mention H5P, which comes with a “Fill in the blanks” content type and several others. Read more about it here: http://h5p.org/blog-fitb. H5P is an open source and free tool for creating interactive HTML5 learning content on popular platforms.
I can’t seem to find Smile via the website you have linked us to. ps. thanks for your great work too!
I clicked on the link and it led me directly to it.
Another couple of Cloze Quiz makers.
http://cybertrain.info/ and click on Cloze Builders.
There are two available.
Instant Cloze – automatically builds cloze quiz by simply typing a word or phrase.
Cloze Maker – allows users to paste their own text and select keywords or phrases.\
Thanks for the interesting article. If anybody is interested in a desktop-application for creating cloze and gapped texts for printing I would like to point out my app Gapped (Mac only – sorry!): http://gapped.de
It features an streamlined interface for creating cloze tests, automatic word-type selection (e.g. select all adverbs in the text etc.) based on automatic language tagging and automated creation of standardised ctests. I am also planning to add an online-based cloze test generator…
These are great resources. I am also looking for a cloze generator that I could link to a google classroom. The idea being that students could open the document as their own, complete the cloze then send back to me as an assignment. I have tried a few google suggestions but not quite found the right one yet. Any suggestions are appreciated.