Cloze

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /kləʊz/

Definitions

1. A format in which individuals must provide absent words to complete sentences effectively aids in assessing language understanding and skills
2. An educational activity that promotes vocabulary development by requiring users to insert appropriate terms into a text to create coherent sentences
3. A type of exercise where missing words must be supplied to complete a sentence or passage meaningfully

Etymology: The adjective "cloze" in its test sense comes from a psychological idea rather than a schoolroom one. The Gestalt therapy movement of the 1950s used "closure" for the mind's tendency to complete an incomplete pattern, and the shortened form "cloze" was adopted for that sense. Its use for fill-in-the-blank exercises came later, when the same mental act of supplying missing words was turned into a way of testing reading comprehension. The link between the two uses is the idea of completing something that has gaps. A cloze passage removes words at intervals and asks the reader to restore them from context, which is the same act of filling in a missing whole that the earlier sense described. The word is therefore a clipped form of "closure," and its meaning has moved from the perceptual to the educational while keeping that core notion of completion.

Synonyms: fill-in-the-blank, gap-fill