Facilitating long-term retention of vocabulary: The second-hand cloze

The study investigates whether the consistent use of a vocabulary reinforcement technique referred to as 'second-hand cloze' can result in a significant improvement in long-term retention of words. Thirty L2 learners of English for Academic Purposes were taught 60 words in text context. Thirty words were submitted to the second-hand cloze (filling in the target items in a summary version of the original texts); 30 were not. On a subsequent recall test, words submitted to the experimental task were better remembered. It is suggested that the second-hand cloze embodies some characteristics of other memorization techniques, but also overcomes their shortcomings.