One of my new goals for this blog is to define all the terminology I use in my TESOL posts. Which means I am long overdue to make a post about gap fills. I've been posting lots of gap fills on this blog over the years, but I've never dedicated a post to them.
Although, even though I've never had a dedicated post, I have talked about gap fills before. I mentioned them in my Language Practice Activities for Grammar post. In that post, I said...
Students are given a series of sentences with one or more words replaced by a gap. Students must supply the missing word to make the sentence grammatically correct. Often the missing word is given to the students in parentheses, and students must supply the grammatically correct form of the missing word. (e.g “I (buy) _____________ a great CD last week.”)
Gap fills are an extremely common prompt in controlled practice exercises. They don’t always need to be gamified. For a more sedentary class, it is perfectly fine to do the gap fills sitting in desks with paper and pencil. However, if you want to gamify them for a more active class, they can be combined with other activities: Board Race, Crossword Puzzle, Garbage Man, Grass Skirts, or Hurricane.
Gap fills can also be gamified by turning them into a running dictation--i.e. the prompts are posted outside the room, and one student must run outside the room, look at the prompt, run back, and dictate it to their partner who will write it down. Then, once all the prompts are written down, the students can begin to answer them.
To this description I should add that there is some controversy about gap fills. Some teachers love them, some teachers frown upon them.
Michael Lewis, for example, argues that we should view grammar as a choice made by the speaker, and not as a matter of right or wrong. So, for example, if a speaker views an event as extended in duration but not permanent, he or she will use the continuous form of the verb (e.g. present continuous, past continuous, future continuous, present perfect continuous or past perfect continuous). If a speaker views an event as a permanent fact, they will use the present simple. This is the difference between saying, for example, "I live in Vietnam" and "I am living in Vietnam". It doesn't mean that the speaker is right or wrong to choose one over the other, it just means that each shows a certain way of viewing the event.
Similarly, if a speaker views a past event as having an impact in present, they will use the present perfect instead of the past simple. So I could say "I have seen that movie" or "I saw that movie", and either would be correct, but each would show that I viewed the event in a certain way.
Michael Lewis, therefore, argues against gap fills as an effective way of practicing grammar. He writes: “Even if we are fully aware of the external context in which language is used, we cannot without complete insight into the speaker’s motivation, attitude, presuppositions, etc, decide precisely the language that speaker would use in that particular context.” (Michael Lewis in The English Verb, 1994, p.40. I've previously used this quote in this paper here.)
So, this is something to always keep in the back of your mind whenever you are designing and using gap fills. My own view is that this objection seems to be more valid in some situations than in others. For example, in my opinion in many cases the difference between the past perfect and the past perfect continuous is very hard to define, and it just comes down to how the speaker chooses to view the event. On the other hand, there are other sets of gap fills in which it does seem that one answer is clearly right and another answer is clearly wrong.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you are using gap fill exercises in your class, be sensitive to the fact that the student may be viewing the event differently from you, and be willing to sometimes accept alternative answers.
Notes:
* This post is for gap fills in grammar lessons specifically. For using gap fills in vocabulary lessons, see this post HERE.
** Over the years I've been posting on this blog, I've used the forms gapfill, gap-fill and gap fill. Apologies for the inconsistency. I've googled it just now, and based on the British Council website and Collin's Dictionary, it looks like the preferred form is Gap-fill.
*** I'll repost the example I linked to above. It originally comes from this post HERE. Google drive links are drive, docs, pub. Notice that, in spite of what Michael Lewis says, it does seem that in many of these sentences there is one answer that seems clearly preferable. Although admittedly...not all of them. A couple of them are probably arguable, huh? Let me know in the comments if you have any strong thoughts.
1. I (buy) _____________ a great CD last week.
2. I (not go) _____________ to the beach yesterday
3. I (meet) _____________ some interesting people.
4. I (not do) _____________ anything last night.
5. I (do) _____________ a lot of silly things when I was a student.
6. I (read) _____________ all the Harry Potter books.
7. I (read) _____________ The DaVinci Code in 2005.
8. I (eat) _____________ too much at lunchtime.
Answers:
1. I bought a great CD last week.
2. I didn't go to the beach yesterday
3. I have met some interesting people.
4. I didn't do anything last night.
5. I did a lot of silly things when I was a student.
6. I have read all the Harry Potter books.
7. I read The DaVinci Code in 2005.
8. I ate too much at lunchtime.
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