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 |
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.
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