How I used “cloze practice” to improve my daughter’s Chinese composition writing

[qqtang0526]

I am a mum in Singapore, and over the years I spent quite a lot of time helping my daughter with Chinese.

She is now studying at Nanyang Girls’ High School, and when she was in primary school, one method I often used with her Chinese writing was something very simple: turning good model compositions into cloze exercises.

The reason was also very simple.

Children can read many model compositions, but reading is not the same as learning.

They may understand a good phrase when they see it, but when it is time to write their own composition, they often cannot recall it.

So instead of asking my daughter to simply read a model composition again and again, I would remove selected words, phrases or parts of sentences.

For example:

小明看到老奶奶提着沉重的袋子，__________地走上前去帮忙。

The child then has to actively recall what could fit into the blank.

I usually did it in a few steps:

1. Read and understand the original composition.
2. Pick out useful vocabulary, phrases and sentence patterns.
3. Turn some of them into blanks.
4. Let the child complete the cloze version.
5. Check against the original.
6. Try the same passage again a few days later.

What I like about this method is that the child is no longer just reading good Chinese passively.

They have to retrieve the language from memory.

And I don’t think children need to memorise an entire model composition word for word.

The goal is to gradually internalise useful expressions, sentence structures and ways of describing things, so that these become part of their own writing toolkit.

The biggest problem was that making these worksheets manually took me a lot of time.

So recently, I built a small tool for myself.

I can paste or upload a Chinese composition, review the suggested learning points, and turn it into a printable cloze worksheet.

I’m now testing this approach mainly for Singapore P3–P6 Chinese, and I’m curious whether other parents use a similar method.

How do you help your child actually remember and reuse what they learn from model compositions?

I’m curious whether other parents have tried something similar. If anyone is interested in trying this with your child, leave me a comment below. I’m happy to let a few P3–P6 parents test the tool and see whether it actually helps with composition writing.