Extensive reading project with first-year students

This semester is winding down, and I was getting the data together to present to students about their extensive reading habits. Here is a brief report.

There are 97 students in this class. They were given the task of checking out and reading a graded reader from the library each week for most weeks. They read a total of 368 books for an average of 3.8 books per learner. The average level of the books chosen, based on the level that the publishers assigned to the book, was 1.35. The most popular book was Marcel and the Shakespeare Letters, published by Penquin. And the most popular series of readers were the Penquin readers with 175 check-outs, Oxford with 100, Macmillan with 90, and Cambridge with 53.

Wordle

Just found a great online "toy" with a wonderful variety of applications for teaching. It's called Wordle, and

is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fronts, layouts, and color schemes.

I made a sheet for review from an advanced level discussion class with the vocabulary that I had mindmapped all written out. I also plan to make a quiz for a beginner level class by putting in a dialog into Wordle and then have the students recreate the dialog or a dialog from the word cloud.