How to Construct

• gap-filling tasks are sometimes based on the authentic texts or specially written passages.
• some words or phrases in the passages have been deleted for the students to restore the missing words or fill in the blanks with correct answers.
• sometimes, it can be more than two answers for some spaces.
• so, for reliability of marking, it is important to reduce the number of alternative answers to the minimum and to ensure that there are no other possible answers which are not listed in the answer key.
• it is essential that the test is tried out on colleagues and then pretested.
• if many of the gaps are not easily restored, or if marking proves to be a problem, a banked gap-filling task may be the answer (each of the missing words or phrases is included in a list which is presented on the same page as the gap-filling text)
• contractions such as "we'll" should be avoided.
• it is always important to tell students whether each gap is to be filled by one or by more than one word.