Sites for Creating Interactive and Printable Vocabulary Exercises
by Kristi Reyes
by Kristi Reyes, Mira Costa College, Oceanside, CA
Posted January 2010, updated September, 2017
Cloze exercises are fill-in-the blank activities in which students demonstrate comprehension of vocabulary and idioms in context, forms and functions of parts of speech, word associations and collocations, and word order. These activities help reinforce instruction or can be used for testing purposes. At beginning literacy levels, cloze exercises can be single sentences, and for higher levels be based on paragraphs and longer texts. If students need targeted practice in improving listening skills, the print-out versions of cloze exercises can be used for listening cloze (dictation fill-in) exercises.
Word search puzzles are more than time-fillers in that they aid students in word recognition and spelling skills. Give some of these online tools a test drive and see how you like them.
Make a Cloze Test
Creating one's own cloze exercise can be a time-consuming process, but with Lucy Georges' Cloze test creator, the site does the work of removing words and adding blank spaces.
Instructions on how to use the site.
Word Puzzle Tools from Discovery Education
By using Discovery Education's Puzzlemaker, you can also easily and quickly create a printable word search puzzle in six steps:
Here is a sample puzzle. Click the "Solution" button to print an answer key.
The site also has tools for creating other types of printable word puzzles that follow the same easy step-by-step process. Examples:
For other printable word searches, try:
teAchnology's Word Search Maker!
A to Z Teacher Stuff Word Search Generator
This tool allows you to create word search puzzles in a variety of shapes, which is a little different.
For list of many similar tools compiled by the Internet TESL Journal, see http://iteslj.org/links/TESL/Lesson_Preparation_Tools/.