How Words are Used Together

Reading regularly is not only a great way to improve your vocabulary and learn new things, but also a good opportunity to develop your understanding of how words work together and which words are commonly used together.

Today's activity is aimed at helping you raise your awareness of this and should help you to create simple 'Cloze' activities that you can use to quickly revise texts and get a deeper knowledge of the lexical relationships in them. The activity uses a tool called a Cloze test creator.


Task:

• You can either use a text that you have studied before or you can find something that interests you on a website like BBC news or the British Council's LearnEnglish site.
• This article on Surfing might be appropriate or you could search for something more suitable in the magazine archive
• Open the Cloze test creator and copy and paste the text that you have read into the text field. You don't need to use the whole text, just a couple of paragraphs should be enough.

• Select 'Interactive' and 'No clues', then select which features of the text you would like to test yourself on.

• You could just make it random and click on 'Submit Query'

The website will now produce an interactive activity for you. You can then type the missing words into the text. If you get the words right you will score points, if they are the wrong word they will be red.

You can use this tool to convert any text into a cloze test activity like this. This is an excellent way to test and improve your English. I hope you enjoy it. To do find more reading activities just click this link: Reading activities

Related links for teachers:

• Create EFL / ESL Lesson Plans in Mins
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Prompting reading speeds

Best

Nik Peachey