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!
