The activity uses a website called Wordle. This site takes the text from documents or webpages and makes them into word clouds (see below). You can then use those word clouds to help you remember the texts you read.
The word cloud above was made by adding the introduction from this page about Shakira from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShakiraTask:
- Go to http://news.yahoo.com/ Yahoo News has a number of different topics to choose from and the articles are quite short so pick one that interests you
- Sport
- Entertainment
- Business
- Politics
- Technology
- Read the article, then copy the text.
- Then go to the Wordle site at: http://wordle.net/create and paste the text into the field. Then click the go button.
- Wordle will create a word cloud of your text. You can then change the colour and print the word cloud or save it to an online gallery.
- After you have printed your word cloud, look at the words and see how much of the article you can recall by looking at the cloud.
- Try to rewrite the article, or a summary of the article, from your memory using the words from the cloud. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, just try to use as many of the words from the cloud as you can.
- Here's an article about Angelina Jolie you can use as practice.
- First read this article: Angelina Jolie Movie Posters Banned in U.K.
- Now click on the word cloud below and see if you can write a summary of the article.
If you have enjoyed this activity then try making word clouds of other texts or study notes you read. Print the word clouds and keep them in a book or pin them to your walls.Each time you look at one of the word clouds try to remember as much as you can about the text.
Good luck. Come back for more EFL ESL activities tomorrow.
Best
Nik Peachey