ABSTRACT
Cloze procedure has been around for a long time. A recent article in English Language Teaching Journal (Soudek and Soudek 1983) reviews a range of applications for this procedure in language teaching. Over a period of thirty years, cloze procedure has been used for error analysis, as a measure of readability, as a tool for informal group-based prediction and discussion activities, for oral language development, for teaching stylistic sensitivity in the literature class, and so on. It is also widely employed as a device for testing language competence. Cloze procedure conventionally involves routine deletions from sentences or longer texts into which a student inserts an appropriate lexical item. The deletions can be random (though they are usually between every eighth or twelfth word) or can be more specifically directed at teaching or testing linguistic features such as particular grammatical categories. It is a procedure which is, however, regularly used to develop vocabulary.
