14 Closely Guarded Tips For Conquering Cloze Passages

By: Rosalind Ong
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Day 2: Give Me A Clue (I)

Hi, I’m Teacher Rosalind from Fun Language Learning. This is the second article of the 14 Closely Guarded Cloze Tips series brought to you by LearnSuperMart and Fun Language Learning.

1. After reading the Cloze Passage once to understand the gist, it’s time to highlight clues and infer.

Clues are found near the blanks, within a sentence as well as between sentences and paragraphs.

What kinds of clues are there?

 

2. As previously mentioned, there are two types:

a) Language Clues

b) Background Clues

 

Language Clues involve language elements:

Language element

What is it?

Ask yourself

Example

Parts of Speech

How a word is used in a sentence

What word fits this part of the sentence?

Nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and  determiners

Collocations

Words that often go together

Do these words appear together often?

had a quick fast breakfast (‘quick’ is often used with a meal but not ‘fast’)

Fixed expressions

Phrases that cannot be changed

What phrase is used to express this idea?

Common expressions:

Rings a bell (= sounds familiar)

Phrasal verbs:

Take after (= resemble)

Idioms:

Turn over a new leaf

Grammar (others)

Rules that govern how words are strung to form a proper sentence

What is the tense of the verb?

How can I link one piece of information with another?

Present, past, perfect, continuous tense etc.

Transition words:

Next, before, after

 

3. Parts of speech and other grammar rules are reliable clues that you can use to think of words that fit the blanks.

However, collocation and fixed expressions depend on your vocabulary range and how exposed you are to different expressions, so they are considered hit-and-miss clues.

Nevertheless, you can still work on them by learning words in chunks. For example, instead of learning ‘vaguely’ and ‘recall’ separately, learn them as a group—‘vaguely recall’.

We will cover these language clues in detail later in this series.

In the next lesson, we’ll look at Background Clues.

 

Visit fllacademy.com or like Fun Language Learning Facebook Page for more language learning resources.

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Posted on 26/09/2017

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