Wordle

What is it about?

Wordle is a very interesting and artificial tool for creating ‘word clouds’ from text that you type in the system. Words that appear more frequently may be provided greater prominence on it by the system. Wordle provides various kinds of fonts, layouts, and color schemes for you in order to develop your special ‘word clouds’. The images you create can be printed out, or you can save them to its gallery to share with your family and friends.

Why is the content good for language learning?

1. Teachers may use Wordle to make their teaching more interesting in class.

2. The creative and colorful image may develop students' motivation toward language learning. 

3. Wordle is a great tool for collecting and sharing ideas to others.

4. It is an excellent for teaching vocabulary in language teaching.

5. The points of a text can be clearly found.

How might you use it in a language teaching context?  

1. I will collect my students’ writing assignment and choose some of them to use ‘Wordle’ to create a ‘word cloud.’

2.     Show the ‘word cloud’ to my students in class, and let them to figure out what words appear most frequently in the texts.

3.     Ask students to write down these prominent words on ‘word cloud’ and discuss with each other why these words are used frequently in their writing.

4.     I would summarize their ideas and help them to categorize words which they should use in the writing and make a word list for them.

5.     I would let my students use the words (on the list) to write a brief article as their homework.

Limitations

Before using Wordle, users need to download the Java system first.