Tag Archives: word cloud

Revising Relationship Verbs

General, ,

I just couldn’t let it pass!  It is not Valentine Day but my fourth year students are working with Relationship Verbs. Bad choice, on the publishers’ side, to ask students to learn expressions related to love when it is time for final exams and they need to concentrate on exams. Now’s the time to hunker down and hit the books! Mental note to email MacMillan about this issue!!!

So, not the right time to learn about love but , anyway,it gives me  the chance to spice up my lessons  using  the WordCoud generator Tagul, which enables you to create beautiful shapes with your words.

The exercise…. , simple  and to the point as I am a bit pressed for time. Students revise vocabulary by looking at the wordcloud and guessing  the right expression.
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Creating Word Clouds with Tagul

Create your own stuff, freeware, Resources,

And again it’s this time of the year when all my free time goes to preparing and marking exams so I don’t have much time left to dedicate to the blog. To tell you the truth, I don’t feel inspired! I start a sentence, I know I want to say something … but inspiration never comes. So I’ve given up! maybe, next week, I’ll be back to my usual self. Meanwhile, enjoy this site for creating Word Clouds. It is called Tagul .

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Retelling a text using Wordle

Create your own stuff, Speaking, , , ,

This is not the first time I have used this strategy to invite my students to do some speaking but it is the first time I have used it with absolute beginners. It has taken me sometime to bring myself to do this kind of activity with my 12-year-old  absolute beginners. I am always afraid the task may seem to them like a high mountain to climb, but they have been studying with me for four months now and I feel they are up to the challenge.

I really feel that I can insist, until the cows come home, English  is not only about learning grammar, but if students are not actively taking a role in their education, there is little I can do.

So I have used a text, they had previously worked  with, to ask them to retell the story. The text was about Education and it told the story of two children Eduardo from Angola and Nabyrye from Uganda. Easy text and all about present simple, which is what they have been studying. Two texts, so great to do pair work!

I have used a tool I have used other times, Wordle, to create Word Clouds to help students remember the story and retell it.

Two useful tricks when using Wordle

♥ If you want a word to be bigger than the rest, just type it twice.

♥ Insert (~ ) between the words you want to keep together.

I have posted about Wordle to revise vocabulary here and to do  a Writing Activity here

Have a nice week!!

Lesson Plan: Retelling an article using Word Clouds

Create your own stuff, In the Computer Room, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking, , , ,

This is a lesson I did with my upper-intermediate students in the computer room and I thought it might be useful to some teachers. The main idea is to retell a text you have previously worked with in class. This is important as  otherwise the task of retelling might be a bit  difficult for weaker students. This is how I did it.

♣ First, for homework, I asked students to reread the text several times .

♣ Then, in the computer room, I asked students to form groups of 3 or 4  and divided the text according to the number of students in each group .

♣ Now, individually and  using the website Word it Out, which is a word cloud generator, I asked them to select the key words in their texts, type them in Word It Out and generate the word cloud. If two words need to be together, it is easy with this generator. Imagine “suffer from”, you only need to insert _ between the two words and they’ll be kept together in the cloud.

♣ Students in groups again, retell the story with the help of the generated  word clouds.

I especially liked this exercise as students get a lot of fun out of it and they collaborate every step of the way. Here are the word clouds generated by a group. I hope you find it useful!

Writing a narrative

General, Writing, ,

This is a writing exercise for my PAU students and I thought you might find it useful. In this written exercise they’ll have to make good use of the vocabulary they have learnt about travelling and going places, the connectors they have studied and they’ll also have to put in practice some of the tips I have given them about the Writing Process, which if you are interested you’ll find published in this blog, here.

This is the idea:
Students, in pairs, are asked to write a narrative. They have to use words from both word clouds, i.e, they have to use connectors from the first word cloud and specific vocabulary from the second. Ask them to write their narrative in coloured  paper which you’ll later post on the walls of the classroom for student to vote for the one they like best.

 

Make sure that you:

♣ begin by describing when and where the story takes place

♣ describe the events in chronological order

♣ use the different forms of the past tense