Cloze Procedure

The term cloze procedure is most commonly used by communication specialists to describe a fill-in-the-blank sentence-completion technique provided to elicit target vocabulary words, linguistic structures (e.g., adjective, noun phrase, and verb phrase), or message content. For the lay public, childhood experiences completing a game of “Mad Libs” with family or friends may have been a memorable, early exposure to a cloze procedure format. If unfamiliar, Mad Libs is a game in which key content words are deleted from a passage and individuals fill in a message or linguistic structure based on categorically based cues to complete the passage in humorous and often nonsensical ways (e.g., “__[exclamation]__! __[proper noun]__ said as she __[adverb]__ jumped onto the boat and sped off with her __[adjective]__ prize.”). However, within the scientific and educational communities, cloze procedures are used in many situations far beyond those representing entertainment purposes.

Clinical researchers in communication and communication sciences and disorders (CSD) may use a variety of differing cues and prompts either alone or in combination as a means to elicit responses from research participants. A cloze procedure is a type of prompt that offers semantic (i.e., word meaning), grammatical, and sentence structure cues to facilitate and frame specific participant responses. Use of cloze procedures is relevant to the fields of communication and CSD because of their frequent and universal use as a prompting method to scaffold—or “bootstrap”—targeted participant responses as part of the intervention phase of a research project, particularly for participants who have a language delay or disorder, or have language differences (e.g., learning English as a second language). Also, cloze procedures may be used in participant interviews to guide response options or as a measurement task for assessment purposes.

In a very general sense, cloze procedures are a regularly used prompting technique by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and other communication professionals to elicit targeted client responses during the assessment or therapeutic process. However, the term has also been used to describe a very specific strategy in which words are systematically deleted from a text, most commonly, every fifth word. When the term cloze procedure is used in this way, it refers to a measure of readability and reading comprehension.

Overall, this entry will provide information on cloze procedure use as a general prompting strategy as well as a reading comprehension measure, descriptions, and examples of typical use across a variety of clinical or educationally served populations, as well as an overview of ways in which cloze procedures may be combined with other prompting techniques to facilitate participant and/or client responses.