Cloze Procedure: a Review
Colin G. Robinson · Educational Research · 1981
Summary The LEAs' and Schools' Item Banking Project (LEAS1B) 1 1 Further information on LEASIB materials both in language and mathematics may be obtained from the Project Leader at the NFER. is developing banks of materials for assessment in language. As background to this it was decided to review the literature relating to the cloze procedure to see if it might be useful either as a measure of readability of the texts to be used, or as a possible method of assessing reading ability in its own right. Cloze procedure was invented by Wilson Taylor in the 1950s, and has become an accepted means of assessing both the readability of a variety of written materials and the reading ability of a variety of subjects. The essence of the cloze procedure is the random deletion of words from a text, the subjects then being required to replace those words. The more words a subject replaces exactly, the greater his reading ability; a passage with a higher mean number of correct responses is easier than one with a smaller mean. There have been vast numbers of articles on cloze procedure since its inception, and the aim is to review the most important findings.