Word Clouds in the Foreign Language Classroom

Ways to Use Word Clouds in the Classroom - by Michael Gorman 

http://www.wordle.net/

http://www.tagxedo.com/

http://wordsift.com/

Foreign Language

1. Have students create a word cloud that highlights the country being studied.
2. Have students create a word cloud of important words to study.
3. Have students word cloud a foreign newspaper article. What are the common words that are used? You may wish to even use show word count. Do it by showing common words. What are the most common? Also, try it with- out common words. Can students tell what the news article may be about before reading?
4. Post vocabulary and spelling words in a word cloud.
5. Put both the English and foreign word into a word cloud. Have students find a way to connect the words. This could be redoing the Wordle with a tilde between words so the go together. It could be color coding the words using the advanced edit feature. Perhaps they just draw lines between them.
6. Create a word cloud of introductory word for discussion by students in class.
7. Have students write a one paragraph reflection on a similar topic in a foreign language. Have them create a word cloud. Combine all the student writings into a class word cloud. Have students compare their individual word clouds with the class word cloud. What discussions and further reflections can be made?
8. Have students write a biography of a famous person from the country studies and include a word cloud of that person.
9. Have students create a word cloud of food items from this country.
10. Have students create a word cloud using statistical information from the country. You may want to incorporate scaling of words and identification of groups using both the advanced edit feature that allow for color and word size.
11. Use Google Translate to translate an American news article into language studied. Make sure it is something very familiar such as movie review, sports story, celebrity, or politics. Create a word cloud and have a class or online discussion of the word cloud. In the end give them the actual article and have them reflect.
12. Have students create a word cloud in the foreign language of an important place or historical event in the country.