This paper assesses the effectiveness of readability indices, standard cloze procedure, and the matching cloze procedure as determinants of the readability of supplementary English materials for elementary ESL students in a Pacific Island context. A review of readability indices and the standard cloze procedure indicated that neither procedure is an adequate measure of text readability, according to the study. Readability indices are identified as not adequately considering differences in sentence and paragraph structure, which are considered a major factor in difficulty levels of elementary ESL texts. The paper states that the standard cloze procedure is too difficult for most beginning ESL pupils because of the production skills necessary to complete the task. Matching cloze procedure, which requires primarily recognition skills, was given to elementary ESL pupils in Saipan to see whether it could be used to evaluate the readability of elementary reading materials. The matching cloze procedure is said to show excellent reliability, and generally correlated more highly with criterion measures for readability. (Author/JCD)