Wordsift

I hope you all had fun with Wordle. Today I will walk you through it's twin, essentially they have the same DNA: vocabulary language learning for comprehension. Now, you will admit that the key to learning in any field is language competence, without which learners struggle especially in content subjects. I hope that makes you feel special because you are the catalysts in every field, every single one of them.

What is it?

You are probably wondering what sifting has to do with language learning. It's not baking school is it? No it's not, but we do 'bake' language learners when we heat their brains with seemingly incomprehensible texts! And that' where Wordsift comes in to separate the finer words from the coarser ones facilitating comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. It is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus capable of generating word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display compels learners to explore and learn. 

Using Wordsift

You need four things to use Wordsift: a digitised text of reading material, a computer, internet connection and this blog entry!! Follow these simple steps and you will be good to go in a jiffy:

• Open Wordsift at wordsift.com
• Copy and paste text in the text box.
• Click 'Sift'. 

Easy stuff, but very effective! As always, here is a little tutorial on using Wordsift. You will find it as easy as I promised. 

After sifting your choice passage, you get a word cloud of the 50 most common words in the passage and their frequency is shown by their boldness-the most bold being the most frequent and vice versa. Here is a word cloud that I created from the article Big Saturday Read on the up coming election in my country, Zimbabwe.

Of course, the most common word here is election and it is easy to tell that this is a political article by merely looking at the most common words displayed in the cloud. Words such as legitimacy, opposition, government, voter etc are all related to elections. Any ideas how this can be useful in a language class?

Teaching with Wordsift

As with all things techy, your innovation is key. I will share a few tips on exercises that you can do with learners. These are very much related to the features of Wordsift. As I sated earlier, this is a fantastic tool for enhancing comprehension and bridging language gaps. One of its features is Cloud Styles which enables the redesigning of the clouds. Another is Sort Words: A-Z; Rare-Common and vice versa, which allow alphabetical sorting and determine how common displayed words are in English language. The Mark words feature determines whether the language of a text is academic, general and so on. These are all crucial  aspects of second language learning. 

The feature I find most useful is the Wordnet Visualisation that you will find to your left just under the wordcloud. Initially, it displays an interactive network of words related to the most common word in your cloud, election, for instance. However, you can always change the display by choosing a word of your own in the cloud. The web tells you whether a word is a noun or verb, gives you synonyms and even different uses and implications! Would you ask for more?

Beyond synonyms, Wordnet displays sentences with the most common or selected word in context! This definitely makes it easy for learners to work out the meanings of words as they are used in the text. Collocations can also be studied this way. What's more, you can even use the images and video options to find images and videos related to the text. When I chose this option guess what came up for my text? All the figures currently associated with elections in Zimbabwe; officials in the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and politicians!!! Here they are: 

Google Images and Video Searches offer crucial support ensuring learners are not confronted with only boring text definitions of vocabulary, but also relevant visual representations of the vocabulary!

Why Wordsift?

It's greatest appeal is the multi-modal approach to vocabulary instruction. This allows learners to learn new vocabulary by integrating new words with old ones, increasing learners' encounters with a word, facilitating imagination, and promoting independent learning strategies. It is a handy toy in the linguistic playground that is readily available to capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts. Generated word clouds can be printed and displayed in classrooms. This dynamic quality allows teachers and students to quickly see the key vocabulary in the text, look for low frequency words that could cause difficulties, and identify key academic words. It also creates numerous opportunities to talk about and explore the richness and wonders of language! Its interactive features offer instant feedback on many aspects of vocabulary learning, which also develops learner autonomy. Once learners are familiar with this tool, it is easy for them to unpack the meanings of words in a chosen text no matter how complex. It is ideal for all contexts where learners have access the internet through personal gadgets which is very common in Zimbabwe.

However,

Wordsift is only accessible online making it a tool for the privileged, To use it, you will need stable connectivity. As always, ensure you have a plan B, just in case something goes wrong with your internet connection or computer. The images and video options also need to be handled carefully as inappropriate content may be accessed by learners. 

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Experiment with Wordsift and its features and let us know how you are getting on. Remember your comments always help improve things. Adieus for now!