Word Clouds for Pre-Reading Predictions and Post-Reading Summarization

Select an image that is from the text you are going to read in class or find and display a text that is related to the topic or theme in the text if the text has no images.

Ask students what is happening in the image, noting people, places, objects, and actions.

Tell students that they will read a text in class that is connected to the image but before reading, they are going to view some of the most frequently used words in the text.

Show the word cloud (projected) and as deemed necessary, provide students with a printout.

Begin with vocabulary and then move on to content predictions.

1. Vocabulary:

• Ask students to notice which words are the biggest in the word cloud.
• Ask why they are larger than the other words.
• Ask students to notice the smallest-sized words. Why are they small?
• Have students define in their own words the largest words. Provide clarification or examples when needed.
• Ask them to say something about themselves using the words, such as with prompting questions: Have you ever...? Do you know someone who...? Where can we see this? When do we experience this? How does this connect with something else we have read or studied recently/in this class?
• Have students search for word variations (word forms) such as liberty-liberation, for example, singulars and plurals. Students could fill out a table with the different parts of speech for a word (e.g., for "joy" -- joyful, joyous, joyfully). Students could also be assigned to circle nouns, underline verbs, put boxes around adjectives, etc. Then move on to word associations. Ask students if words have positive or negative connotations, and register (formal, informal).
• Have students name or (as applies) draw lines between synonyms and antonyms. 

2. Content Prediction:

• Ask students to return to the large words.
• Together (or by asking for volunteers) think aloud what the text could be about.
• Individually or in pairs or small groups, have students write a sentence (or more) predicting the main idea of the text.
• Depending on the student's level, provide feedback on content and mechanics (grammar, punctuation).
• Have each student or group share their sentences.
• Notice and remark on how they used the words from the word cloud and the similarities and differences between the predictions/sentences.

3. Read the text (together or in pairs/small groups or individually) after surveying the text (reading the title, looking over text features such as bold and italicized words, tables, images, graphs, subtitles, first paragraph, last paragraph, etc.) together.

• A helpful metacognitive practice for students is the think-aloud, in which the teacher reads the passage and models the thinking process when reading: predictions, clarifications in comprehension, guessing meanings of unfamiliar words, connections to other texts, and class content).
• The teacher can also model annotation of a text, particularly marking the most frequent words in the text as revealed by the word cloud.

4. Checking predictions: After reading the text, return to the sentences students wrote predicting the content of the passage based on an analysis of the word cloud. Which predictions were correct? Which need altering to improve them or make them more accurate?

• Students then rewrite the sentences they originally wrote to be more accurate summaries of the text they read.
• Optionally, students can share their summaries with the class and do further analysis.
• Ask students what they learned from this exercise to encourage reflection.

Students will be able to predict content based on key vocabulary and summarize the main ideas using key vocabulary after reading a text.