Word Clouds for Teaching Vocabulary

Teaching vocabulary can be fun. New words are like a box of chocolates to be opened, cherished and savored. I recommend teaching them through play. Today I recommend a site that calls itself "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide." Words that appear more frequently in the source text appear much larger in the cloud.
At right you see a word cloud made by the site wordle.net. It displays the words that appear most often in the blog of literacy (literacynetwork.blogspot.com). You can enter the web address of a site, cut-and-paste to create your own, personalized cloud. Or simply type in some text from wherever you like. I tried it out by pasting in the text of the Gettysburg Address. Then I tried one of my own emails. Tutors could try generating clouds using a learner's Language Experience Approach (LEA) story or a passage from a book that they are trying to read on their own. The visual arrangement gives you some insight into what kind of words they need to be able to read. It gives them a picture of what words they are learning to use.
With a few clicks you and your learner can rearrange the words, choose pleasing colors and change the font. Contrary to what my mother (and father, and grandparents) like to say, sometimes you just have to get your head in the clouds.

The English Language Learning Professional Development Network

Executive Director Jeff Burkhart informed me of this cool new resource, the English Language Learner University. Developed by the U.S. Department of Education, it offers free on-line courses to help you become a more effective, better informed tutor or teacher. The courses dive into topics in second language acquisition, teaching English to emergent readers, assessment, principles of language teaching and the role of culture in teaching.

At left is a screen capture from a course I signed up for. All you need to do is create a user name and password, then a simple click registers you. Particularly interesting was a course that has not yet started titled "Teaching Adult ELLs [English Language Learners] Who Are Emergent Readers." As with other on-line courses, you can participate in text chat with instructors. There is also a message board for students to share questions and answers with each other. Why not give it a try? Click here to visit the site: http://www.ell-u.org/

Fluency: the Secret Ingredient in Reading

Reading involves several different parts moving at the same time—rather like walking. Those parts are phonics (also called alphabetics), vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Tutor training at Literacy Network leans heavily upon direct phonics instruction, since it is the thing many dyslexics need most immediately.
Fluency deserves our attention as a skill that learners can improve with practice. It involves the combination of accuracy in identifying the individual words, the rate at which they read and the conversational tone of voice—also called prosody. Better fluency leads to better comprehension, as it helps students to make the reading meaningful and applicable to their own experience.
In this post, I want to describe a technique I learned about at STAR (STudent Achievement in Reading) training this month at Madison College.
Repeated Reading is simplicity itself. It follows a style of teaching in which the tutor first demonstrates how to do something, does it together with the learner, then finally supports the learner doing it for himself. It starts with a discussion about what the learner wants to read, how long it should be and how fluently he/she wants to be able to read it. Ideally it should be a text at the learner’s instructional reading level—something that is a little more challenging than what they can read very easily but not so challenging as to be frustrating. The learner first reads the passage aloud to the tutor. He or she then hears the same passage read with fluency. You, as a tutor, are eminently qualified to model fluent reading for your learner. If you feel that a professional could do a better job, though, you can sometimes employ a recording of an actor to show the rate and prosody of a confident reader. Take, for example, the first ten lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is easier than it sounds at first. The Flesch-Kincaid reading scale rates it at grade level 6.8. You can find a recording in the public library or on the internet, for instance at this site: artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm. The public library has audio book versions of many popular works ranging from Shakespeare to my favorite children’s book series, Frog and Toad.
The learner then reads the text on her/his own repeatedly, trying to read in their own voice with fluency. This part could be an excellent homework assignment. Finally the student reads the text for you, the tutor. Reading repeatedly helps a learner gain confidence, and confidence gives people a reason to stay involved.

Advertising In the Service of Tutoring

A tutor named Giso Broman wrote me recently about something he tried with his learner. He started thinking about advertising while listening to "Marketplace," a program on the local National Public Radio station. He thought about how advertising infiltrates our lives and wondered what he could do to use it in his lessons. Giso works with a learner who is relatively advanced and has an interest in business. Here is what he wrote:

My brainstorm came to me as I was listening to the weird, overly clever language that Kai Ryssdal uses on his program. These kinds of idiomatic turns of phrase are a big part of what L. and I have worked on together. I thought that, rather than look at a magazine's articles (which has worked well for us before), why not look more deeply at the advertising?

Kai Ryssdal

I'm sure I didn't "invent" this idea, but it worked perfectly for L. and I that I must admit that I feel pretty clever right now. The ads in Forbes magazine - L. is a finance guy - were surprisingly rich despite their brevity. There were some strange vocabulary words, but the more useful bit was talking about everything that each ad left out. "Who is this ad targeting? What kind of customer is this company trying to attract?"

L. very interested in business and marketing. I pointed out when a word, like "lustrous", wasn't necessarily going to be very important to memorize, and instead we talked more broadly about the themes, intended audience and subtext (without using the word subtext)… There are no right answers when it comes to ads and we had a very animated discussion of what we thought of each ad, each customer base and the underlying meanings, symbols and cultural significance of each. In describing this idea, I feel like it sounds incredibly complex and even trivial. In fact, though, it was our best meeting yet.

It's not something that would work for every learner, or indeed every volunteer, but L.'s level of sophistication and a little bit of vigilance on my part (like not getting overly philosophical) made this a really great exercise. The cultural elements (for example, Who is Sean Connery? or What is a "fountain of youth?") were an unexpected bonus. I was able to elicit a lot of really thoughtful opinions from L. and he was eager to flip through from ad to ad right up until the librarians flashed the "closing soon" lights.

Please Phrase It As a Question

Think about the game show "Jeopardy."  The contestants read the "answer" on a screen. To make it more challenging, though, they then have to form the question that fits it.  Forming questions in English can sometimes trip up and discourage learners. Practicing this skill can take the form of a fun game I saw in the website Dave's ESL Cafe.  The site has games and other resources for teachers and tutors who want to swap ideas that have worked for them.

Describing a game called "Questioning the Teacher," Ankara-based ESL instructor Burcu Tunca begins, "Students are always curious about their teachers and each other, so this can be played in pairs or between class and the teacher. It is a good icebreaker both for children and adults and helps students to speak."  
To begin, write some answers related to your life on the whiteboard or on paper.  I, for instance, might write, 

11
Gary Fisher
Scallops

and so on. My student would then have to guess what the right question is. "Is 11 your child's age?"  No.  "What is your shoe size?"  Yes, it's eleven! Next question.  "Who was that chess champion in the early 70s?" No, that was Bobby.  "What kind of bike do you ride?"  Yes!.   "What is your favorite seafood?"  You could then have your learner try to write some answers for you to think up questions for. 
Inverting the question-answer format could make for a fun, low-inhibition activity.  Give it a try.