Wordle

Tired of trying to get your students to learn just another word? Stressed about ever shrinking vocab bases? Well, stress no more, I have the panacea right here. It's clourful and spellbinding. Wordle their game-fried minds and dramatically improve the quantity and quality of both written and spoken language in your classes. With word clouds, it must pour tons of vocab! And they will all get soaked, trust Uncle Cliff on this one.

So, what is Wordle?

You may have guessed from the colourful picture above, it is a free word art tool that turns any text into a visual representation of content by mixing whole chunks. Words that appear frequently in the text are made prominent in the cloud, making them demand attention like needy children . Clouds you make can be tweaked with different fonts, colours and layouts. For instance, if you are going to teach vocabulary on, say computers, you can give the word cloud the shape of a desk top! What's more, pictures you create are yours to do as you please with: save on your machine, print and even share.

Creating your very own Wordle!

It's the easiest thing you have ever done. All you have to do is select and copy the target text- this can be from any source: novel, short story, poem etc; open Internet Explorer-other browsers may not support Wordle; search for Wordle.net; select create and paste your text into the text box; hit 'create' and bingo! You are an instant van Gogh! There is really no need for downloading any software or signing up. Here is a comprehensive tutorial that will make you a wordsmith in just a few minutes. 

Making the best of Wordle

There are numerous ways to use wordle in ELT. The traditional ones are teaching new vocabulary; revising texts; predicting and pre-reading exercises or introducing new texts. Dialogue or text creation is also possible with word clouds, so are text comparisons; and displays of survey results. 

Specifically, word collocations, scramble sentences and dictogloss can all done using word clouds. Can you find the haiku in the the word cloud above? Is that 'numerous?' May be not. But I have found a super dude who boasts up to 35-ways-of-using-word-clouds-in-language-teaching . Awesome isn't he? Go ahead and consult good old Greg. You will learn plenty of innovative ways to teach vocabulary. It's a double serving: you teach in a fun, colourful and effective manner and save yourself the agony of reading trite so-last-year stories. You won't need to mark with a glass of ale this time, you will need just your glasses!

Affordances?

Like I said, because it has very few options and features, Wordle's affordances are a little limited. However, the bright side is that the word cloud is perfect for many fun exercises. Among its popular features are text visualisation, contrast and comparison, and wall display. Affordances encompass data visualisation, text mining-which helps learners sort huge data- and its ability to render the gist of a text at a glance. Over and above these, Wordle is visually appealing and fun because of its infinite ability to surprise through randomisation. It's also a handy tool for self reflection.

But...

All that glitters is not gold. Once you save a word cloud there's no editing, it's pretty much a one way street of limited features and options. You need to carefully consider the content of the texts you select for use because inappropriate words just might be given undue prominence by Wordle. The consequences are too ghastly to contemplate.  What I found particularly frustrating about this artsy tool, is its affinity for Internet Explorer and dependence on Java! Without these two, you won't do much.

As always, have fun with this new toy. Be a wordsmith and inspire your flock. Help them soar the dizzy heights of word clouds and may their creativity pour down and drench us all!!!!!