How to use function words on a cloze passage to focus on different aspects of language

Functors or function words are the 'little words' (pronouns, helping verbs, articles, etc.) that have little lexical meaning on their own but hold the lexical words together and (along with changes to the lexical words' forms, morphology) integrate these words in grammatical sentences.

Functors can be used in a cloze passage in three ways:

• Do nothing. A standard n-word passage will extract both lexical words and functors, and hence replacing them in a passage is a kind of 'global' language task
• Ask the program to ignore function words in its gaps selection. Do this by clicking "+all functors" - this will make them "words to skip" and will create an n-word task focused on lexical words only.
• Ask the program to select only function words for learners to replace. Click "+all functors," and when these appear cut and paste them into Box 7a and remove them from Box 8. Then set the Mode to "Rational: Word". This creates a task focused on function words only.

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October 2018