Before I start on the topic, I want to share a story with you.
Last week, I was chatting with a friend on Whatsapp. He was lamenting that his son was scoring very low marks for the English written paper. He did not understand because his son loves reading. Basically, apart from watching the television programmes, his son spends most of his time reading in his room.
This was not the first case I came across.
The love for reading is very important. I ignited this love for all my children when they were very young. However, reading can be active and it can be passive too.
Many children read passively because the art of active reading was not taught in school. Grammar and Vocabulary were easy to teach. The skill of active reading requires a lot of time and a lot of effort on the mentor and the students.
I model active reading almost every week in my tuition and I will show you what active reading is in the cloze passage below and it is closely related to all the components of the English Language.
In schools, we break the English Language down into 6 major components:
- Reading
- Writing
- Listening
- Speaking
- Grammar
- Vocabulary
To improve your child's mastery of the language, he MUST practice all the 6 aspects of it. It is like growing a plant. The roots, leaves, flowers and stem all grow together. It is not good to have very big leaves and very small roots.
For my tuition class, I teach all the six components but focus mainly on Reading, Writing and Grammar. They are the most lacking in today's classroom.
To score well in the Cloze Passage section, I recommend the SAP technique.
- Skim through the passage
- Apply Active Reading Skill
- Proofread
Take a look at the following passage. It is taken from a P5 SA2 paper. Skim through it first without filling in the blanks.
The passage is about sea turtles. Some possible words that will come into your mind are
- lay
- tough time
- sea
- many eggs
- digging
- flippers
- crawl for long distances
- every year
At this stage, we are not looking for the right answer. We are activating the background knowledge. This will help to prepare the brain to 'connect the dots' and get ready to fill in the blanks.
Then, we go on to the crucial stage: Apply Active Reading Skill.
Active Reading Skill is the skill to identify the most suitable word class for the sentence before determining the word for the blank.
For beginners, I recommend identifying the are 6 main types of words first.
- Nouns
- Verbs
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Conjunctions
- Prepositions
The first blank:
I was walking along the moonlit beach looking for nesting turtles. Having to complete a project on it, I had to observe and record their habits and behaviours over a __________ of three months.
The clue here is 'three months' and we are looking for a noun to talk about the duration here. Hence, the word is 'period'. A period of three months.
Second blank:
I was watching the shore intently when my eyes suddenly __________ sight of one of these gentle giants emerging slowly from the water.
The clues here are 'watching' and 'sight'. What is the phrase that is similar to watching and has the word sight in it. The blank is most probably a verb phrase.
The phrase is 'catch sight of'. The passage is in the past tense and hence the correct form of the phrase should be 'caught sight of'.
Third and fourth blank:
I had accidentally startled one of them __________ my previous trip there and the sea turtle smashed some of its own eggs by __________.
The clue is the relationship between the action 'startled one of them' and 'my previous trip there'. Here, we need a preposition. The answer should be on my previous trip there.
Then we look at the the fourth blank. The author is trying to describe how the turtle smashed its own eggs. That means we are looking for something to describe the action, which is an adverb. By accident would be most appropriate here.
Last two blanks:
This time, I was cautious when moving towards the sea turtle so as not to scare it away. As I inched __________, I realised that its rear flippers had been completely torn off! __________ them, it would be painful for the sea turtles to dig its nest.
Next, we look at the fifth blank. The author is trying to describe the action of inching, which means, it should be an adverb. The other clue is the phrase 'moving towards' in the previous sentence. Combine both clues and you will most probably be looking at inching closer.
Finally, we look at the last blank. First, we look at the word 'them'. What is the author referring to? They were referring to the rear flippers in the previous sentence and there had been torn off. If the flippers are gone, that means the turtle would not have any flippers. Hence, the word here should be a preposition. The word without would be most suitable here.
Then, we apply the P in SAP: Proofread the passage. This will confirm the suitability of all words and help the student check his work.
After making notes, the passage should look like this.
By now, you will have a rough idea what Active Reading is. It is actually actively seeking out the relationships between the words and sentences. It is uncovering of the big picture before drilling into the details.
You can see from here that Cloze Passage is not about just filling in the blanks or doing a lot of worksheets. It is really about Grammar and Vocabulary. It is really about skill.
Linking back to my story at the beginning of this blog post, I told my friend that a child can read passively without thinking about the relationships of the words. Hence, it is not the quantity of reading that we should look at. It is the quality of reading that we should emphasise on.
However, Active Reading is a very time-consuming skill to teach and it requires the teacher to be first adept in the skill. Therefore, I won't be surprise if you have never heard about it until now.
Before I end, I leave you with a thought: Will Active Reading also help in Writing and Open-Ended Comprehension?
I will write more on it in my future blog posts. Stay tuned!
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