Using contextual clues effectively in cloze procedures

Oo, L. K. C. (2005). The use of contextual clues in cloze procedures by Primary Six pupils in Singapore (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://libris.nie.edu.sg/

Background

The author observed that students performed badly at comprehension cloze.

Aims

This study examined the extent to which Primary 6 students were able to locate and make use of contextual clues when doing cloze passages. The author was also interested in the difference in the strategies used by proficient and less proficient students.

Sample

Ten Primary 6 students of three different ability groups (five in high, three in middle and two in low level groups) in the same primary school in Singapore participated in the study.

Method

The students worked individually on a cloze passage. They noted the contextual clues that they located for the blanks and described how they made use of the clues to arrive at their answers. Four of the students were selected for an interview. The students’ success in locating and making use of contextual clues was judged based on semantic and syntactic accuracy. Four types of responses were identified:

Type of response	Semantically accurate	Syntactically accurate
Type 1	✓	✓
Type 2	✗	✓
Type 3	✓	✗
Type 4	✗	✗

Findings

The findings showed a high number of Type 2 responses for all the students, suggesting they had a good sense of grammatical sequence, but had problems with meaning. The authors highlighted that this could be due to too much attention being put on the linguistic segment in question at the expense of the sense of the sentence and passage as a whole. Many of the students were able to locate the right contextual clues most of the time but failed to make use of them correctly, which led them to their wrong responses.

With regard to reading strategies, the study suggests that though the high ability pupils on average did not use more strategies, they did, however, use a wider range of strategies compared to the lower ability pupils. While more global, meaning-based processing strategies were preferred by the high ability pupils, a more local, word-based processing was favoured by the average and lower ability pupils. The author found that these latter students tended to apply their reading strategies sporadically, unsystematically, and sometimes inappropriately.

Implications

The author recommended teaching less proficient readers to use reading strategies and context clues in comprehension cloze to make more accurate and reasonable guesses in their cloze.

Original article retrieved from NIE Digital Repository.