Word Clouds

TagCrowd is one of easiest but not the prettiest word cloud tool I've tried out.

adult africa amused birmingham blog born camping childhood country decided different discovered earth english esol holidays kingdom later local married nightmare parents parts primary round school siblings sons spent studied teacher teaching things training united university variety wandering years

created at TagCrowd.com

http://tagcrowd.com/

I've been trying to make my own word clouds for years, but there are these wonderful tools that do a much better and quicker job and have huge visual appeal. Copy a text into the site and you get all the content words to appear in different sizes depending on their frequency in the text.  The more I look into this tool, the more ideas I get.  Here are a few which I've come up with, inspired by Nick Peachey's blog. 

• Paste a reading text or transcript in, print it off or put it on your smartboard and students can predict  its content, register, title or genre,  before reading or listening.  They can also use the words to compose a list of yes/no questions about the text.  You can answer them and students can compose their own text before reading the original.  Otherwise the questions just make a good focus for reading and listening. Nick Peachey's idea of using the word clouds to review these texts later in the term is  great one. The 'gorilla joke' word cloud was made in 'wordle', a more visually attractive tool.  If you don't know the joke, you're welcome to guess how it goes.  It's at the end of this post, if you're interested.  It demonstrates quite well how useful variable wordsize is in helping you to guess the main characters, setting, etc.

• Dialogues could be put into a word cloud to get students guessing and reconstructing.  The tool can be set to include all the words from the text so students can reconstruct it fully.  Spot  the way this word cloud highlights the informal emotive register of an 'embarrassing accident' anecdote below. Make sure your students notice the sizing isn't just random.  There must be many other ways of exploiting frequency analysis with this tool. 
  
  

• I love the idea of using these for reviewing vocabulary.  Over the years I've kept boxes of cards to pull out for a ten minute review at the end of a lesson.  You can see how a stock of these on your computer would be immediately more memorable and appeal to the visual learner in everyone. 
•  I also like the idea of students pasting texts about themselves into wordle, printing them off, randomly distributing them and asking each other questions to help identify the writer. Beginner literacy students can use it more like a word search, looking for recognisable words they have recently met in a text. 

The previous two word clouds are made with http://www.wordle.net   

At the moment, these tools seem to me to be wonderful for teachers and classrooms.

However...
I haven't found enough ideas for students working on their own.  I've tried a few word cloud tools and there are pros and cons with each: some (like Wordle) don't save easily except by screen capture though they can be captured onto a smartboard or printed off; others come with a thesaurus, though this is not very ESL friendly.

A gorilla joke

 

A gorilla went into a pub, walked up to the bar, and ordered a whisky. The barman was rather surprised, but he gave him the whisky, and then he thought, gorillas probably don’t understand much about money, so he asked him for £15. The gorilla gave him the money and started drinking. There was a silence for a few minutes, and then the barman said, “Excuse me, but you don’t often see a gorilla in a pub.” “It’s not surprising,” said the gorilla, " with whisky at £15 a glass.”