Using the cloze procedure as a means of improving remedial reading students' use of context clues

Abstract

This study was undertaken to analyze the use of the cloze procedure as a tool for improving remedial reading students’ use of context clues in word recognition, vocabulary development and reading comprehension. -- The students selected for study were three female and two male fifth graders from an elementary school in Conception Bay, Newfoundland. They attended a regular classroom for all subject areas of the curriculum except the Language Arts Program which was undertaken in the Learning Resource Room where individual help was given daily by a Special Education teacher. The students' ages ranged from nine to eleven years. -- The standardized tests used to obtain data were The Weschsler Intelligence Scale for Children, The Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test, The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and The Canadian Test of Basic Skills. An analysis of the data indicated that each student was slightly below average ability in word recognition, vocabulary development and reading comprehension skills. Testing, employing a miscue analysis inventory, further indicated that none of the students were utilizing contextual clues to obtain meaning. -- The investigator used various cloze procedure methods in working with each of the five students over a ten week period. The methods employed were oral context; content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs; vowels from selected words; selected words with only the initial consonant included; omission of letters from words; deletion of every tenth word and random deletion of words. At the end of the ten week study period, post-testing was carried out using The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Level D, Form 2 and experimenter-written cloze tests using cloze passages in which every tenth word was deleted. This post-testing provided an evaluation of each student's reading comprehension and determined group gains. -- The standardized post-tests indicated an increase from one year to one year four months on comprehension skills and from six months to one year one month on word-recognition and vocabulary development skills. The experimenter-written cloze tests indicated that when exact responses were given, the range of scores for the five students was from 50% to 70%, while the range of scores when appropriate synonyms were scored was from 90% to 100%. In addition, students at the end of the study scored from 70% to 100% on cloze passages with a readability level of 4.5 as compared to scores from 60% to 80% on a 2.6 readability level at the beginning of the study. The results of the standardized post-tests and the results of the experimenter-written cloze tests indicated that the cloze procedure was effective in raising each student's word recognition, vocabulary development and reading comprehension skills. -- This study indicates that the cloze procedure is an effective teaching and testing tool which should be considered as part of the regular curriculum for remedial reading students.