Closing the Gaps in Cloze Letters to Editor: A Verbal Protocol Study

Abstract

Originally, cloze procedure was introduced by Taylor (1953) in order to assess reading comprehension in the first language. The usefulness of close procedure has often been asserted as it is considered easy to administer and evaluate (Sadeghi, 2021) L1 and L2 reading comprehension. The present study was conducted to find out the impact of cloze instruction on the success in guessing abilities of L2 learners. The impact of function words and content words on the correct guesses of the deleted words was also explored. The theoretical framework given by Bengleil and Paribakht (2004) was adopted with some modifications. The study employed the texts of letters published in newspaper Pakistan Observer. Both control and experimental groups were asked to think aloud their thoughts processes during their hunt for the missing words. The instructional model CALLA___ presented by Chamot and O’ Malley (1994) _ was used. While the experimental group received cloze instruction, the control group was taught in the traditional way.The findings have revealed that after receiving instruction treatment the experimental group outperformed the control group in finding out the appropriate words for the blanks. Furthermore, the subjects of study made more successful attempts for the deleted function words than the deleted content words in the cloze texts.