#literacy tools

Printable JKL Alphabet Bookmark Set - From APWT Stationery

For one of our class assignments we created word clouds. Now wordclouds are fun to fiddle around with, and you will see two I have made, but let me tell you, I was not that passionate about them, and we didn’t really use them when and where I went to school.

They, like most things have their uses. Word clouds, in my mind, are mostly limited to classes with a literature element. So when you are in English lit classes, you can plug in poetry or selections from books or short stories, and boom, you can pull out some of your key words. Woo hoo. The bigger the word, the more important it is apparently. Fine. However, when I looked at it from a foreign language standpoint, I realized something.

This has a great application for the foreign language classroom, especially when you start having your children reading selections in Spanish. Reading more than a couple sentences was very intimidating for me at first, and it felt like I was starting all over and suddenly I knew nothing at all. (It took me at least 45 minutes to read a piece that was maybe a half a page long. MAYBE.) Now if you put a short section or all of a reading (depending on length, of course) into a word cloud generator, you can create a visual that shows your students the high frequency words, and it gives them a great starting place for vocabulary. They can look at something like this one:

(wordcloud of Poderoso Caballero es Don Dinero by Francisco de Quevedo created by @srtajax using wordclouds.com)

Now, this is not a complicated or hard to understand poem, despite being written in the early 1600s, but, when introducing it to the class, you can present this, and have them look at the large words. Chances are, they are probably going to know what words like “Dinero,” “caballero,” and “poderoso” mean, but what about “pues” or “oriente?” those are opportunities to have students digging in their dictionaries for what exactly “guerrero” means, before they read, but it will also help them see just how many words they do know before they start so they go into it saying “yeah, you know what, I CAN read poems in spanish.”

One of the things I did not know about word clouds going into it is that these days, the generators can make your wordcloud in all kinds of shapes. Here’s the one for the same poem I made on tagul:

In this instance, the tagul generated wordcloud has a larger variety of sizes and so more words stick out (at least to me) but I had to work harder to get it as an image I could share here.

There are dozens of word cloud generators out there, so I encourage you to find one that you like, but I quite like these two. I would also encourage using them in a foreign language classroom, whether its teaching a second language, or teaching ELL, to help build the confidence in your students that yes, they can read in their target language, and that they probably know more words than they think they know. The more I look at these, and the more I think about them, the more ways I’m thinking of using them.