Juggling Words on Wordle and WordSift
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Tag or word clouds are known to be crowd favourites in the education world, both for the purposes of lexical development or literacy and for decoration (they're just so pretty to look at!). A word cloud is literally a group of frequently occurring words from a text clumped together into a cloud-like shape with the most frequent words appearing larger, while tag clouds are slightly different in that they function as categories- the Labels column on the left is an example of a tag cloud where the tags with most content appear larger than the others. Here I'll be sharing with you super clear-cut and convenient tools for creating wonderful word clouds: Wordle and WordSift.
What can Wordle offer?
If you're going for a more aesthetically-pleasing word cloud, Wordle is the perfect fit. All you need to do is to copy-paste your text onto the palate available and hit "Go". You can also paste a link to a website of a blog entry and with a click of a button, Wordle will instantly make clouds based on the text content. The editing features on Wordle are much more comprehensive - you can alter the font (lots of font face to choose from) and the layout and color scheme, or if you're "feeling lazy", click on"Randomize" and the templates will automatically change for you. You can save time and still have beautiful creations in the end.
From a linguistic functional aspect, WordSift might bring more to the table, since Wordle only lets you remove numbers, common words in a few languages other than English, and make the text upper or small case. The number removal function is actually quite useful because if you're pasting a text with numbered points, the recurring numbers would just get in the way and be no use. With Wordle you also have the luxury of deleting single words from the cloud (simply right-click on the word), which WordSift doesn't seem to offer. This might be useful for taking out unnecessary definite/indefinite articles or prepositions (non-content words) or contrastively, remove the most frequent word if you want students to guess what it is.
When finished, you can easily save your word clouds in the form of a picture (.png) or save it as a PDF before printing. Take a look at this short tutorial video from YouTube on how to optimise the use of Wordle.
Are there any glitches on Wordle we should know about?
You need to get the latest version of Java browser plugin to be able to create and preview the word cloud. The FAQs page informs pretty much all the procedures you need to do to install and verify your Java, but this process can get a bit frustrating if you need to go through the hassle of failed downloads or troubleshooting. A word of warning, Google Chrome, I hear, doesn't support Java, so opening it on Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer would be best.
Another limitation is that I don't think there's any way to save the word cloud into your account - simply because you don't need to sign up to create a cloud. Therefore, if you want to retrieve and edit a previously saved cloud and you've closed the application, there's no way but to start from square one or recall from memory the editing changes (template, font, layout) you made earlier.
What can I do with WordSift?
The interface for WordSift might not be as fresh as Wordle, but it offers more weighty features. You can tweak the aesthetic features just like the previous tool, only with less varied options. But there's the leverage of sifting: the liberty to choose how many words you want to include in the word cloud - you can make it more concise (revealing only important content words) and have students make sentences based on it, and gradually adding words onto the cloud to consolidate their predictions. Another plus point for WordSift is that it automatically filters out auxiliary words that bear no exact meaning, generating only content-word clouds.
The in-text sentence finder and Virtual Thesaurus are signatures of WordSift . If you click on a word, you get instant information on where it is located in the text (the sentences are singled out) and synonyms/definitions are given, digressing to other parts of speech. Your learners will then be able to see both the lemma and lexemes as well as complete definitions of a certain difficult word within the topic. In other words, when texts are pulled in from teacher-assigned webpages, students will see how the lexis is used correctly within context to which they've already been sensitised - not topically detached sentences. This way, learners are more able to pick out relevant patterns or collocations for its use, e.g. how the word "genetic" is commonly paired with "mutation", "modification" and "drift".
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| From the word "genetic" found in the text, learners find out about the lemma "gene" complete with its lexemes ("genic", "genetical", etc.) |
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| Learners will see the words used in context and figure out its patterns of use. |
The saving option for WordSift includes .svg files for embedding to a blog or website html, which might be useful if students want to create a personalised word cloud to decorate their blog.
As far as I know, no plug-ins are necessary for WordSift - a bit of a time saver. For visual elemts, however, the words in the word cloud are coloured differently, yet with no reasoning behind it - would be good to have colour-coded categorisation, for example to indicate parts of speech. In the previous version, there are coloured categorise specifying what kinds of words students use, e.g. academic or general, but for some reason, this function is no longer viable. Also, the image search doesn't seem to work. I kind of want to sweep this under the rug when writing out this post. All you have is the empty image search box there - quite a shame considering how potentially useful it can be, e.g. for making flashcards or picture-based word lists.
Here is a tutorial for the older version of WordSift. Some functions might not be applicable, but you can get a rough idea of how to navigate through the tool.
What are some useful classroom applications for word clouds?
There are abundant resources on the web for meaningful exposure - but in order to really internalise the language for useful intake, structured tasks can be used for learners to be able to process. Here are some ideas (several I got from my tutor and classmates) on how to incorporate word clouds into your English lesson:- Previewing text (predicting content and creating main idea sentences): You can start off with only five or so most frequent words and have students guess based on that, and gradually increase the word count if they have difficulties. In comparison to whole texts, word clouds do not cause an eye strain and might motivate students to read through the text.
- Comparing texts: For example, students see how two news articles or columns talking about the same event use different lexis to portray the authors' standpoint. The author might be exhuming certain feelings or judgment by their use of emotive adjectives or abstract nouns.
- Writing revision: For Wordle, you can see how often a word is used in the Show Word Count option under the Language tab, but for a more detailed outlook, WordSift is the way to go. Students can be assigned to replace their most frequent words with more academic ones using the Virtual Thesaurus.
- Making a vocabulary list: Learners can find definitions, synonyms and sample sentences for a thorough word list (you'd need to copy-paste to Word though). Because the sentences are from real texts, students can make the word-list thematic.
- Making posters or book covers for decoration: You can have students design their report/paper covers with word clouds from their essays.
Spare a couple of minutes to try out Wordle and WordSift - it's so easy and effective that you won't want to miss out on using word clouds in your class!
4 comments
Thank you for the sharing Kak Priska :D I didn't know that "tools" like those exist on the internet :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Indra. Try it out in your next writing or reading lesson.
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ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the your suggestion of creating posters with word clouds. What a brilliant idea!! This way you can link their artistic side of an individual with essay writing. I strongly believe that word clouds are a piece of abstract art. The creation of an artistic collage from the essays a student writes, can inspire them to be creative with their essay writing.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I perceive it as a driving force of motivation, since the more essays they write the more collages they are going to be able to produce. This will work better when the students type the essays themselves in wordle and start playing with the word cloud. Typing their essays in wordle will also give them an opportunity to revise their essays and become more aware of the methodology of essay writing.