The Auld Alliance

Cloze texts like the one on the Auld Alliance offer several educational advantages. Firstly, they encourage active reading, as students must pay closer attention to the text to fill in the blanks. This engagement improves comprehension and retention of historical facts. Secondly, the strategy of leaving out semantically important terms challenges students to use context clues and prior knowledge, fostering critical thinking and inference skills. For the topic of the Scottish Wars of Independence, highlighting key terms such as important figures, dates, and concepts through blanks helps students focus on the crucial elements that shaped this period. Additionally, the cloze text format can be adapted for various learning levels by adjusting the difficulty of the missing terms, making it a versatile tool for differentiated instruction. Moreover, discussing the answers in a classroom setting can promote collaborative learning and stimulate discussion on the strategic importance of alliances in medieval warfare. Finally, this method can inspire students to further research topics of interest, such as the broader implications of the Auld Alliance on European history, thereby fostering a deeper understanding and curiosity about the past.