Introduction
What is a word cloud?
I had the same question, before I discovered how easy and fast it is to make one. As 'a picture is worth a thousand Words', I am just going to show you an example. There are several tools that you can use to generate your own word clouds such as Tagxedo or Wordsift, but today's post is about Wordle which is a flexible and intuitive online tool to make beautiful word clouds.
How to use Wordle?
As you can see in the tutorial, you can customise your clouds by changing the font, the layout, the language, or the color. An important feature of Wordle that I forgot to mention is that you can remove words from the clouds by simply clicking on them and on remove, which makes it interesting for classroom use, for various purposes.
What can we use word clouds for?
Creativity is a key word for English language teachers. We are always looking for new ways to bring variety in our classrooms by personalising educational tools to fit our teaching contexts. Original ideas often stem from imagination, therefore reflecting on how best we can integrate any tool for English language learning is a must. Word clouds from Wordle can be used in various ways.
1. Teaching vocabulary through brainstorming: As you can see on the example above, you can make a word cloud by copying and pasting a text that you are planning to use for reading comprehension. Then remove the words which are already familiar to your learners and leave the ones you think are relevant to the chosen topic. Show the word cloud and ask your students to guess topic by prompting if necessary with leading questions in the form of a brainstorming. You can then pre-teach the vocabulary with different strategies. It can be used to identify synonyms, antonyms, adjectives, verb tenses and so on.
2. Building sentences: Giving your learners mixed words from a text and asking them to make meaningful sentences that can be joined to make a paragraph, is another way of using word clouds. This activity can be related to sentence structures such as the place of adjectives and adverbs in a sentence. A great idea from one of my colleagues is to organise classroom groupings according to the different colors on the word cloud. For example, each group can be assigned a color and come up with a meaningful story or paragraph, using only words of that color.
Limitations
As mentioned in the tutorial, Wordle only works with internet explorer and cannot be opened in Chrome or Firefox. Macbook users can use Safari but need to install java.
