This is the first question that I asked myself when I first see a book that has cover picture made of word cloud. I know that pictures on covers of books are often done with the at most care to communicate the message of the book. As a result it is common to see names of people who did that in the inside or outside cover of books (cover picture by _____). So what is the value of this word cloud as cover picture here? After I got a chance to see how word cloud is done using the ICT tools and especially after we had a discussion in the classroom about its contribution in language teaching and learning, I realised now two important things. The first thing is that I was not critical about what the words in the cloud represent. The second is that I have never imagined that such practice can be used for further educational purpose, especially English Language Education.
Wordle is one of the ICT tools that can help as do such word cloud. As usual, let me introduce what it is, how can it be used in English language teaching and what are the features that can be considered while preparing to use it in classroom.
What is Wordle?
As I mentioned earlier, wordle is an ICT tool to make word cloud for different purposes. The word cloud often has words with different font size and colour the most frequent word/s have larger size and the size of the font of the words goes smaller as the words become less frequent. The procedure to create Wordle document is very simple and short. The following video shows you how you can easily create your wordle document.
What is the use of Wordle in English language teaching?
The most important question for this short article is what purpose wordle serves in teaching English language. In my perception wordle can be used for different purposes while teaching English language. At a higher education level especially at the stage where collocation of words is discussed. The result from analysing a written text can show us preliminary information about word frequency of the text. This however is very elementary level information. In the document prepared above we can see that the words presentation, presentations and Saturday, are used frequently.
In addition to, this we can produce different kinds of lessons for teaching English language. I will try to discuss how can we use such documents to teach vocabulary, writing and speaking.
We can ask our students to work on matching words with synonyms
We can also facilitate a reconstruction of a paragraph based on the jumbled sentences that we have produced from it using worlde. The following picture shows how to do that.
We can ask students to guess and speak or write about what is the main issue of the wordle document. They can use the words given as hint. It can facilitate collaboration and group dynamic while students try to make meaning out of the words and try to visualise the words written in small font size. We can consider the fun that can lessons create as a tip for our class as well.
Things to be considered
Wordle is just a single ICT tool. It is obvious that it cannot help us to prepare our lessons all the time and so does any other ICT tool. However, we can think of which tool can help us produce what kind of lesson. This is often to the decision of the teacher. In addition to this, there is one limitation of wordle as we can see in the jumbled sentences exercise above. In the exercise, the students are expected to figure out each word in the sentences so as to understand the complete meaning. This could be time consuming.
It is better give it a try and see what can we improve about it.
Good Luck
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