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.

English Central

What is English Central?

English Central is a website that help people to learn English by watching videos. It is perfect for students to practice speaking and pronunciation as well as vocabulary. Most of the videos are authentic materials, ranging from famous speeches to popular TV serious. It offers different categories to meet all kinds of students' needs, including academic English, business English, media English, social English, travel English and even English for young learners.

Click here to check out my introduction of English Central's homepage.

How to use English Central?

This is an official tutorial video on how to use English Central to 'speak a video', and to learn vocabulary.

What are the strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths

• It is the so far the best website (I have ever seen) to help English learners with their pronunciation.
• And it is FREE!
• It automatically analyzes your pronunciation and then tells you your problems in RED subtitles.
• There are plenty of videos to choose from for learners of different purposes, ranging from videos for younger learners to business English, from famous speeches to updated movie clips. Learners could choose the video according to their own preference. Therefore, they are likely to be more motivated.
• It also classifies videos according to the learners' level of difficulty, so that learners can choose videos according to their own proficiency.
• Some of the videos, especially those for higher proficiency students, are authentic materials, which are closely related to their real life topics.
• Besides practicing oral English, students could also learn some new vocabulary.
• Some videos, especially famous speeches or TED talks, are beneficial to learners in a much broader sense. The ideas and knowledge in the videos can be very helpful to learners in many aspects other than English.
• It is likely to enhance learners' motivation and autonomy.

Weakness

• It requires relatively fast internet speed and good computer system. Sometimes it doesn't work smoothly since it contains video playing and audio recording and pronunciation analyzing at the same time. It takes time especially when it analyzes your recordings. So just be patient and don't press any other buttons before it finishes the analyzing process.
• There are still some technical problems when analyzing recordings. Sometimes when we speak fast, it can not distinguish words that are pronounced together without obvious pauses.
• In order to get a good recording for analyzing your pronunciation, you do need to have a good earphone and microphone connected to your computer.