(ICT) Note the spelling: Cloze not Close - which is deliberate and was invented by Wilson Taylor: Taylor W.L. (1953) "Cloze procedure: a new tool for measuring readability", Journalism Quarterly 30: 415-433. Cloze procedure was originally conceived as a tool for measuring the readibility of a text or a learner's reading comprehension level and derives from the gestalt psychology term "closure", whereby people tend to complete a familiar but incomplete pattern by "closing" the gaps. In Cloze tests or exercises every nth word (usually 5th to 7th) or a certain percentage of a text is blanked out and the learner has to fill in the blanks with a suitable word, but not necessarily the original word that appeared in the text. In the days before computers the words had to be blanked out by hand, but now a computer can do the job in seconds, varying the word deletion interval. Cloze procedure is still widely used in language learning and teaching - including Total Cloze, where the whole text is blanked out - and figures in numerous CALL programs. See Section 4.6, Module 1.3, headed Cloze procedure. See Section 8, Module 1.4, headed Text manipulation. See: Gap-filler, Text Manipulation