by Sandra Haywood, University of Nottingham
It’s “cloze” in American English, and “gap” in British English, but whatever you like to call it, here’s a free site you can use to quickly create a listening/reading activity requiring students to fill in the blanks. The GapMaker is just one of the features this website offers. It also provides extensive, leveled word lists of academic English vocabulary, concordance exercises, and some exercises and teaching support.
Of course, there are many other academic word lists on the internet (but perhaps not leveled as these are, by complexity), and there are other sources for concordance information and activities, I presume, but this is the only Cloze-maker that I have in my toolbox (naturally I stopped looking once I discovered this, so please advise us if you know of a better/different/more usable tool).
Just copy a text, paste it into the word box, and choose the level of difficulty (1 to 10) — 1 having very few blanks, and 10 having many blanks, and even multiple, consecutive blanks (two or three consecutive words missing).
Sometimes I create these purely as reading exercises, but more often than not, I add a listening component. I find an article, interview, or speech that has both audio recording and text, change the transcript to text or doc format, drop it into the GapMaker, and create a cloze exercise for students to listen to and fill in the blanks.
This feature allows you to not only adjust the number of blanks by choosing the difficulty level, but also to either include the missing words in a chart at the end, or leave them off. High level support vs. low level of support.
Strengths: fast and easy to use
Drawbacks: American teachers, note that this site is British, so expect differences in spellings of vocabulary words; kind of an ugly site, but then, looks aren’t everything!