What is the term for removing words or phrases from a passage and requiring students to fill in the blanks?

• A. Cloaking
• B. Deletion
• C. Retention
• D. Cloze

Answer: (D)

The main concept is a cloze task: a passage has words removed and students must fill in the missing words using context and language knowledge. This exact term—cloze—captures how readers predict and reconstruct text from surrounding clues, which is a direct way to assess reading comprehension and vocabulary inference. Other terms don’t fit as well: cloaking isn’t used for this activity, deletion is a generic description of removing words but not the established method, and retention refers to memory, not completing a passage. Cloze tasks can be tailored in difficulty to measure how well students use context to infer missing information, making them a practical tool for evaluating language processing and understanding.