New Zealand forestry is a topic that most people would not be particularly familiar with, but could probably read with comprehension if they knew the vocabulary content. In other words it is a vocabulary dependent text, not a prior-knowledge-dependent text.
Nation (1990) used this text to let his reader experience what a cold text looks and feels like to a reader who knows 1000 word families, 2000 word families, and so on. In his book Vocabulary Teaching and Learning the forestry text was presented three times with three levels of known words.
You can use VP_Cloze to achieve this same effect and other variations of this effect.
Put the forestry text into the box, and choose one of the three "post" levels from the menu. For example, choosing post_2k will show the 2k items as words and all the rest of the words (post 2k) as blanks. This is what the text looks and feels like to someone who knows only 2000 words.
Except, of course, that even unknown words contain known components, like word endings (-ed, -ing, etc). As of 2010, VP-Cloze include this information on the clozed words.
A further refinement is that no learner ever knows all the 1k words and none of the 2k, etc; they often show a mix of knowledge from several levels. This is especially true for learners whose language education has not included a vocabulary emphasis, or who have had some sort of skewed exposure to the second language. For this reason, the menu offers choices like Random_70 and Random_90, these referring to percentages, to show what a text looks like to learners with a certain average percentage of word knowledge across levels.
Read more about recent work on VP_Cloze in the 2010 RIFL paper in Research Page - papers.
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