Reading is one of the ways to improve vocabulary. The more texts that you read the better your vocabulary will be. The tools that I'm going to introduce today will help you to learn vocabulary found in online text. The tools are Wordle and Wordsift.
What is Wordle?
Wordle is a tool that creates word clouds. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different colour schemes, layouts and fonts.
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| Screenshot 1: Wordle's example |
How to use Wordle?
- You can watch the tutorial video below if you want to know how to use Wordle.
What is Wordsift?
Wordsift is a tool that allows us to insert text and play with the result. It is a bit similar to Wordle where it clouds the words out of a text, but it can only show up to 50 most used words in the text.
Wordsift is a tool that allows us to insert text and play with the result. It is a bit similar to Wordle where it clouds the words out of a text, but it can only show up to 50 most used words in the text.
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| Screenshot 2: Wordsift's example |
How to use wordsift?
- Follow few simple steps shown in the tutorial video below to help you sift the words.
How are they relevant in language learning?
Wordle and Wordsift are convenient to all levels of students, which means they are suitable for students as low as beginner to as high as advanced students.
Teachers can use both tools for pre-reading activity. Based on Aebersold & Field's (1997) model, pre-reading stage should aim at activating students' schemata. Therefore, what can teachers do with Wordle and Wordsift is giving each student a word cloud and get them to guess what the text is all about. By doing this, students are likely to remember the vocabulary in the long term as such activity can raise students' awareness of the text that they are going to read later.
Furthermore, teachers may use Wordsift to introduce vocabulary to students by involving students into class discussions about the relation between the vocabulary and the words in Visual Thesaurus.Teachers can also use Wordsift by asking students to work in groups to construct sentences in Workspace. Teachers can make it as competition where which the group that comes up with the most sentences will be the winner.
Teachers can also use Wordle and Wordsift to expand students' talent in creative writings. Teacher can make copies of word clouds and give them to students. Ask students to use the word clouds to write an essay, a poem, or a song. This can develop students' creativity and visual intelligence in writing different genres. Allow them to continue their work at home and send it to you via email once they finished doing it. You can then give them feedback and embed their work onto the class blog. This definitely make them feel proud of their own piece of work. You can even do it as competition and make the students vote for the best writing.
Advantages
- Arrangement- Wordsift helps words to be sorted from 'Common to Rare' or 'Rare to Common' and 'A to Z' and 'Z to A', which will be helpful for the teachers to introduce vocabulary to students according to such arrangements.
- Detect words and meanings- Students can check meaning of the words by using the visual thesaurus. The synonym and antonym of the word will also come out. Wordsift also helps to identify where the word is found in the text, which students can see how the word is used in the text.
- Art and brain - Wordle allows you to choose different layout, font and colours which make your words clouds beautiful. By looking at the beautiful Wordle art will help students to learn vocabulary better because brain tends to capture the words better if they appear in different colours and shapes and store them in memory.
- Free- You don't have to sign up an account in order to create your word clouds
- Unnecessary words-Wordle and Wordsift will take out unnecessary words, such as linking words(e.g. after, before,& and). They do not also notice the subtle differences in the same word, thus, treat the word as two separate subject, for example, presentation and presentations (Screenshot 1). You can still remove the words that are not wanted from Wordle in the language setting.
- Requires Java- It requires you to download and install plug-in in order for you to cloud the words which make it a bit fussy.
- Public-Your cloud will go into public view and you cannot make it private.
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