Wordle——Make your own beautiful word clouds!

What is Wordle?

Wordle is a website that can quickly calculate the word frequency of your chosen text and make it into different types of beautiful word clouds based on their relevant frequency.

How to use Wordle?

Wordle is very easy to use. Basically, here are the steps you'll need to do.

1. Go to Wordle. Click the 'Create' button.

2. Paste your chosen text and click 'Go'.

3. Wait for a few seconds and you'll get your word clouds.

4. Make certain adjustments by choosing your the font, color, layout and some language to make it look better.

5. Give it a name and save the url address and the code.

For further instruction on how to use Wordle, please watch this tutorial video.

How does Wordle foster language teaching and learning?

1. Pre-reading Tasks. Before introducing a piece of reading to students, teachers could show them the word cloud first and do the following tasks.

• Ask students to guess the general idea or the topic of the text.
• Ask students to discuss this topic so as to activate their schemata. 
• Ask students to make up some sentences with the most frequently used words. 

2. Post-reading Tasks. After students have read the text, put the text away and do some follow-up activities based on the word cloud.

• Ask students to write down the topic sentence of the text based on their memory and the word cloud.
• If students have higher level of proficiency, the teacher could ask students to reconstruct the text. 

In both pre-reading and post-reading activities, this tool can help students to construct their own language, during which process, they will have to pay attention to not only vocabulary, but also collocation and grammar in order to reconstruct the text. It encourages students to do a lot of language processing, through which language acquisition is achieved.

What are the good points?

• Easy to use, no need to register.
• Highly customized and very beautiful formats of the word clouds.
• Calculate word frequency very fast.
• Result in beautiful final product.

What are the limitations?

• You have to have Java in your computer for Wordle to work. Ipad is not available.
• Every time you change the font, the whole cloud changes. So once you see a cloud you like, save it ASAP.
• When I embed it into my blog, the picture was too vague. The one below is captured by Jing.
• It does't concern any further vocabulary exercise except the frequency.

An example

This is a piece of news from Warwick official website, reporting that University of Warwick the 'Top Target' for graduate employers.

Please click here for the news.

I set up all the colors, chose a favorable font and crossed out those most frequently used English words such as 'the' and 'is'. I also canceled some words which I think is not quite relevant to this topic. And the picture below is what I've got. You can also check it out by the specific url address which I forgot to save. So, always remember to save the url and the code.